


Change Partners

by avocadomoon



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), forcibly outed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24549061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avocadomoon/pseuds/avocadomoon
Summary: "Rich," Eddie says heavily. Meaningfully, and Richie holds his breath, both afraid and hopeful that Eddie is about to say something really sappy, likeI always knew and it didn't matter to me,oryou know I support you no matter what. Eddie takes a deep breath before he speaks, and Richie closes his eyes, braced for it. "I didn't look at your dick pics.""Well hey, Eds, thanks," Richie says, laughing incredulously. "Thanks for that."
Relationships: Bill Denbrough & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, The Losers Club & Richie Tozier
Comments: 151
Kudos: 866
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Change Partners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liesmyth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesmyth/gifts).



> title is from the [roseanne cash song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYppgWZUGfQ). thank you to liesmyth for the incredible prompts! you should know that I have like three different half-completed attempts at different ideas from your letter. I couldn't settle on just one, which is the best problem to have. this final effort is the result of, ah, _none_ of them technically, because i am a very frustrating, contrary person. I dearly hope you enjoy it anyway.

The flight from Bangor to Los Angeles is nine and a half hours in total, with a connection in Newark that Richie almost misses because he's too busy doing shots by himself at an airport sports bar like a dumbass. The minor upside to being a somewhat well-known celebrity with a first class ticket, however, is that they page him on the overhead when he doesn't show up, and the guy sitting next to him at the bar looks up blearily and says, "hey aren't you that one guy?"

"I don't know, probably not," Richie says honestly, and accidentally leaves his cell phone sitting right there on the bartop. He doesn't realize it until he's already in his seat, fumbling around in his pockets for it so he has something to look at that isn't the hot stewardess pantomiming the safety speech right there in the aisle next to him, her tits lined up almost exactly with Richie's unwilling eyeline, and when he realizes he curses so loud she pauses mid-safety belt demonstration to shoot him a dirty look.

And so this is how the contents of Richie's camera roll are leaked onto the internet just two weeks after he and his middle school friend group's adventure in the murder sewer, which is just the cherry on top of the shit cake, really. Bill's the one to break the news, because one new and fun thing about grown up Bill is that he apparently _lives_ on the internet.

"Hey Rich," he says, in the voice he gets when he's about to break some bad news. Richie grips the side of his front door and has an intense flashback to the day in eighth grade Physical Science class when Bill accidentally melted Richie's Trapper Keeper, and subsequently all of his homework, over the bunsen burner.

"Hey Billy," he says warily. Bill's wearing a mothball-eaten Van Halen t-shirt, flip flops, and a pair of designer sunglasses that Richie recognizes from last year's Emmys. At nine o'clock in the morning, the effect is fairly comical.

"Can I come in?" Bill tugs off his sunglasses, and instantly looks much more like himself. Richie's shoulders relax minutely. "I brought breakfast." He holds out a bag from Brooklyn Water Bagel like it's a peace offering or something.

"Oh Jesus," Richie says, instantly panicking. "Is everything okay? Stan?"

"Yes, fuck, everybody's fine," Bill says, face blanching. "Just thought I'd bring you breakfast. I got back into town last night."

"Jesus Bill, we just spent two weeks together. Did you guys not get my email? I lost my phone."

"I know." Bill gets a stubborn look on his face and seems to give up on wrangling an invitation, pushing past Richie's arm and bludgeoning his way into Richie's apartment. Richie blinks, then frowns, and then slams the door shut. "That's why I'm here, actually. I can't believe you live all the way up here. Holy shit, Rich, this _view._ " Bill tosses the food on Richie's kitchen table and makes a beeline for the balcony, pulling the sliding door open and letting the morning air in.

Richie scowls in his general direction and plops down at the table, tugging the bag over to see what kind of bagel order Bill thinks Richie would want. "Yeah, it's not bad."

"A mountain view condo in Hollywood Hills isn't _bad_? How much do you pay for this? Wait - I don't wanna know." Bill shakes his head at him. "Fucking sell out."

"You're one to talk," Richie says, ripping open what appears to be a sandwich with some kind of salmon. He wrinkles his nose and tosses it aside, picking a different one from the bag. "I've seen your house on Entertainment Tonight. You have a motherfucking movie theatre in it."

"It's Audra's house," Bill says, joining Rich at the table and grabbing the discarded sandwich. The salmon is his, apparently. "She owns it, she pays the mortgage. We didn't combine our finances when we got married."

Richie's sandwich has bacon and jalapenos on it. He takes a huge bite and all at once remembers why Bill was always everybody's favorite. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" he asks, with his mouth full. Bill rolls his eyes at him. "I don't know anything about being married, man, you gotta translate for me."

"It's, ah," Bill says, grimacing a little awkwardly, "it's just a me-and-Audra thing."

Richie raises his eyebrows. "Okay." Bill takes his own huge bite and avoids his gaze. "I own the condo, actually. Bought it outright with my first big movie check about ten years ago. It was my mom's idea, she thought I should lock down a place to live before I had a chance to blow the rest of my income on hookers and blow."

Bill chokes a little on his salmon, pounding his chest with one fist. "Ah, Rich," he says, in that same bad news voice. "Speaking of. Have you, uh, looked at the internet at all? This morning, or last night?"

Richie sets his sandwich down carefully. "Oh crap."

"I'll take that as a no," Bill says slowly.

"My phone," Richie says. Bill nods, reaching out to touch Richie's shoulder. "Crap."

"Rich," Bill says again, careful and quiet. Richie glances at his face and in that instant, he just _knows_ that Bill knows, and his stomach curdles like spoiled milk. "Listen to me. It could be a trick. Do you know what I mean? Whoever stole your phone...they could have released stuff that wasn't from you to make you look bad. If that's what you think happened...I'd believe it."

Richie laughs out loud, so loudly and suddenly that it almost hurts his throat. "That's not what happened."

"Are you sure?" Bill's face is kind, so kind and gentle it hurts to look at it. "Because if that's what you need us to believe...we'd believe it, Rich. Until you're ready."

Richie wants to fucking cry about how earnest his voice sounds. "No," he says, swallowing back nausea. "No. What you should believe is that I'm fucking gay, Bill," he says on a gasp, and then lays his head down on the table for a second, trying to breathe evenly. Bill keeps his hand on his shoulder, squeezing tight. A sudden breeze gusts through the still-open door and catches the sandwich wrapper by Richie's head, and it flaps weakly, trapped by the weight of the half-eaten bagel.

Bill's gaze is steady when Richie finally lifts his head back up again, and he doesn't comment as Richie takes his glasses off to clean them, wiping tears off his lenses with the bottom of his shirt. "I love you, Richie."

"Yeah," Richie says, sliding his glasses back on. His head feels like a balloon that's just been popped. "Yeah, fuck. I love you, too."

Bill nods once, and takes his hand back, and resumes eating his sandwich, and Richie thinks, _that's it? That's it. I could've fuckin' done that thirty years ago._ "So, I'm assuming you haven't talked to your management yet."

"Fuck, uh, no," Richie says. "I don't have a phone, dude. I was gonna go out and get a new one today."

"Well that's our first stop then," Bill says, talking through a mouthful of salmon. "You have an agent, right? Your tour manager is that Steve Baldwin guy from RCA, I remember you telling me that, but I assume you've got somebody who manages you more generally?"

"Nah man, Steve does everything," Richie says. He feels sort of floaty and disconnected from his body, and one corner of his head is frantically running through what he remembers of his photos, trying to think of what could possibly be floating around out there, how many exes he'll need to call, how many sensitive phone numbers are now no longer private. He's had the same phone for almost two years now; there was a fucking lot on there. "I have a publicist, though. I'll need to talk to her."

"I would've thought she'd have called _you_ by now," Bill says.

"And _how_ would she do that exactly, Billiam?"

"Don't you have a landline?"

"No, _Grandpa_ I don't have a _landline_ , because it's fucking 2016." Richie scoffs, feeling marginally more like himself. "A landline, Jesus Christ."

"Okay, okay." Bill's mouth twitches into a half grin. "We'll kick it old school then. Go to her office. She's got an office, right?"

"She works out of New York. Once I get the new phone though, I can call her." Richie picks up his sandwich, suddenly hungry again. "Shit. She's gonna dump me for sure now."

"Hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?" Bill nudges him. "You've been in the business a long time. So you probably heard about what happened to Audra, right?"

There is literally no single soul in Hollywood that has not heard about Audra Phillips' sex tape, and the ensuing behind the scenes controversy and lawsuit that bankrupted her former talent agent's firm. Richie decides right there on the spot to never, ever, _ever_ mention to Bill that the majority opinion in the industry is that she'd leaked it on purpose to get out of her contract. "Yeah, man. She handled it really well."

"It got her the role on True Detective," Bill confides, and Richie almost chokes on his sandwich. "Cold comfort, I know. It was still a huge breach of privacy, obviously, and she still struggles with it sometimes, but…" Bill shrugs. "You can leverage it. It's not the end of the world."

Richie takes a deep breath. "What'd you see, man?" He looks over at Bill, his eyes narrowed. "How much is out there?"

"I didn't look at very much of it," Bill says quickly.

"Bill."

"All I saw was a couple of photos," Bill continues reluctantly. He looks up at Richie apologetically. "They were explicit. Just you, no one else. But they posted some text logs too."

"Shit." Richie has to put his head on the table again, so it won't float away or explode, or something.

"They blurred out the other guy's name. Nice of them," Bill says bitterly, rubbing Richie's back comfortingly. "I'm so sorry, Rich."

"Does everyone else know? They've all seen it?"

"Yeah. Eddie was the one who saw it first," Bill says, and Richie's head snaps up so fast he gets light headed again. "He called me early this morning and told me to get over here and check on you."

The news that Eddie Kaspbrak has seen both his dick and very probably some of his sexts too is altogether way too much to fucking handle for Richie this early in the morning, without coffee or alcohol to soften the blow. "Nice of him," he says, strangled.

"Rich," Bill says shrewdly, "he loves you. We all love you. You know we don't care. You do know that, right? You don't ever have to worry about the Losers. We've got your back always."

Richie has an eerie vision of himself pulling Bill in close for a hug and then burping straight in his face, which is how fifteen-year-old Richie would've reacted to this moment. Twenty-year-old Richie - had he remembered who Bill was - would've punched him, probably. Thirty-year-old Richie would've cried. As it is, forty-year-old Richie just yearns deeply for either a latte or a Valium. Whichever he can get his hands on first. "Bill," he says wearily, rubbing the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses, "that's gay."

"No, you're gay," Bill says, not even skipping a beat. "Apparently."

"I know you are but what am I," Richie says quickly, in a nasally voice that sounds pretty successfully similar to Richie's little sister circa 1991, and Bill nearly chokes himself laughing. "Gimme your phone. I wanna text everybody real quick."

"Have at it. I'm gonna make coffee." Bill swipes it open and pushes it across the table, still grinning, and gets up from the table. On his way towards Richie's kitchen, he leans down and kisses the top of Richie's head, giving him a half-noogie afterwards that makes Richie wince and swing his arms at him meanly. Bill's always been too quick, though. "You do have coffee here, right?"

"Motherfucker, I have movie star coffee," Richie says, opening up the text app. He stops short on the log with Eddie; the most recent message says, _let me know when you see him, and if he's alright,_ and his heart constricts with a weird combination of pain and anxiousness that is so familiar to Richie at this point as an Eddie-flavored emotion he barely even registers it. "I have coffee crapped out by exotic birds at the San Francisco Zoo."

"Gross," Bill yells, from the kitchen. Something falls onto the counter with a clatter. "You son of a bitch. Fucking _Folgers?_ "

Richie snickers, typing out a text in the group log - _this is Richie. Yes it's true yes I'm fine I'll call everybody soon. Thank you love you and will someone please check on Stan_ \- and then locking it right afterwards quickly, so he's not tempted to snoop in Bill's texts to Eddie any more than he already has. "It's the best part of waking up, Billy."

"Fuck you, we're going to Starbucks," Bill says.

Richie's publicist is a rich Clinton feminist who privately despises Richie's stand up and has never hesitated to let him know it. He's been her client for almost twelve years, and in the beginning he'd been perversely proud of that and would always include a Lewinsky joke or two, just to piss her off specifically. Looking back on it now, late twenties/early thirties Rich was a real asshole.

But Nan's never been all that nice either, though. That's probably why they continued to get along despite everything.

"You could've warned me," says Nan.

"Oh yeah sorry, I definitely should've given you a heads up that I was gonna get my phone stolen and hacked," Richie says, rolling his eyes at Bill, who is lingering by the condiment bar and pretending not to eavesdrop.

"I meant that you were gay! How long have you been gay?" Nan demands, as if she wants an itemized timeline, or something. "Oh my God. Were you gay when you slept with my assistant? You fucking asshole."

Richie pinches the bridge of his nose. "I was _drunk,_ Nan, and she came onto _me_ \- "

"You could've told her _why_ you dumped her the next day, it would've made her feel better!"

"You're telling me I should've outed myself for the sake of your receptionist's ego?" Richie says, sort of aware that he's shouting in the middle of this Starbucks but not really having the capacity to care, at this current moment, "Jesus fuck, Nan, you've been mad at me about this for like eight years, would you fucking get over it already?"

"She was the best _executive assistant_ I ever had, screw you," Nan says, making rustling sounds on her end. Richie can picture her in her big fuck-off office in Manhattan, cell phone stuck between her face and her shoulder, throwing her files around as she looks for the one little scrap of paper that she's looking for. "She was heartbroken. Couldn't look me in the eye for months. Quit without notice to go work for a goddamn bank."

"She wasn't in love with me, she didn't give two shits about me! She just wanted to date somebody on TV, get real," Richie says, waving his hand at Bill's concerned face. "She would've gone straight to the tabloids if I'd told her. You remember all those blind items about me being impotent back in '09? You know that was her. You never admitted it to me, but I know you knew."

Nan sighs. "I wouldn't have leaked it, Rich. You could've told me."

Richie snorts. "No."

"I could've _helped_ you. It's my job to keep your secrets, remember?" Nan huffs, and Richie looks over at Bill, who is now sitting at the table looking pained, and mouths, 'kill me.' Bill grimaces. "That is what you pay me for."

"Oh really, because I thought I was just paying you to yell at me periodically. That really turns me on," Richie says snidely.

"Listen," Nan says, with the tense note in her voice that usually signals she's near the end of her patience, "are you done with your nervous breakdown? Are you done with that? Because I need to write you a statement and it will require you to appear in public and be emotionally stable for at least a week or two, and that's not gonna work if you puke all over another audience and then disappear for another month."

"It was only two weeks," Richie mumbles, scowling at his latte. It hasn't been helping as much as he thought it would.

"Is there anything else I need to know?" Nan asks pointedly. "Are you secretly married? Did you join a cult?"

"No, but I did kill somebody when I was back in my hometown," Richie says. Nan makes a loud, irritated noise, straight into the speaker of the phone. Bill kicks him under the table. "Don't worry, it was self-defense."

"Okay," Nan says flatly, "sure you did. Do you wanna call me back another time when you're not on your period?"

Richie doesn't reply for a second, too busy having a furious whisper-fight with Bill, which ends in another under-the-table kick. He gives a sullen sigh and says, "no."

"Okay," Nan says. "Well, you'll need to go on Ellen."

" _Fuck_ no."

"Oh come on, Rich - "

"No, I'm not fucking doing that. Nan, listen to me. I'm not doing anything like that," Richie says, and he must sound really serious because Nan actually goes quiet, like she's listening for once. "I'm not doing any interviews with fucking...Out Magazine or Buzzfeed whatever the fuck. I'm not gonna sit there with some goddamn twenty-two year old Twitter personality and talk about my fucking trauma like my life was a very special episode of Degrassi. That's not happening." Feeling a bit light-headed, Richie looks up at Bill, who is regarding him very seriously over his coffee cup. At Richie's look, Bill gives him a nod, like he approves, and the fourteen-year-old that lives perpetually in the back of Richie's head does a proud little fist pump. "If you think we need a statement then write a statement. Tell them my private life is private and it's none of their business and that's it. That's all I wanna say."

"Rich," Nan says, uncharacteristically gentle, "if we do that then you'll look like one of those Republicans that get caught in a bathroom somewhere. You know those balding fuckwads who go on television with their wife afterwards, apologizing for their 'lapse in judgment'?"

Richie sighs heavily. "I don't have a wife."

"And what's the difference between that, and saying nothing? Letting your career up to this point speak for itself? You've made a lot of very heterosexual jokes, Rich," Nan says apologetically. A short beat of silence ensues, in which Richie deeply regrets every major life decision that has led to this moment, but most especially the hookup in question, who was a nerdy sound engineer saved in Richie's phone as _Hot Guy From Rachel's Party._ Richie really just...laid it all out on a fucking platter, didn't he? "Look. There's no way for you to come out of this without looking like you were overcompensating. We can say you're bisexual, not gay, that will help, but people still won't really believe it unless you give them something genuine. Doesn't have to be a TV interview, but you have to do _something._ Otherwise you're gonna look like a dick. A fucked up, repressed dick."

"Jesus fucking Christ," Richie mutters, taking his glasses off to rub his forehead. Bill leans in and squeezes his shoulder in silent support, leaning his knee against the outside of Richie's leg.

"Your ex-boyfriend is already talking about it on Twitter," Nan says, and Richie's stomach drops for the millionth time this morning. "Not the guy from the sexts, a different guy. Someone named Josh?"

Jesus, Richie hasn't thought about him in years. "Ah, yeah. That ended badly. What's he saying?"

Another beat of silence. Richie realizes with a start that this is actually Nan attempting to be sensitive. "Maybe check it out yourself later."

"God." Richie laughs, at himself and at the situation, unable to scrape up any real emotion about any of it other than a sick sort of resignation that is sort of darkly funny. In a very series-finale-of-Seinfeld pathetic and sad sort of way. "Fine. Fine, just - email me something. A statement or whatever, and find me an interview then. No TV, and nobody younger than me."

"Okay. I can do that." More rustling. Richie hates Nan's guts, in the way that he sort of hates everybody who works for him - an overtanned cadre of Hollywood professionals who have poked and prodded Richie down a career path he never actually agreed to, over the course of the last decade - but in the end, it's not really her fault. It's not Nan's fault that Richie's spent most of his life hating himself, nor is it Steve's fault that his jokes are dishonest and hacky. It's not Beth The Talent Agent's fault, or Miles The Assistant's, or Jake The Writer's. It's just Richie, and his inability to speak up. Because he sort of _is_ a fucked up, repressed dick, and that's the sad truth. "I'll email you in an hour or two. Call your lawyer next, he's been leaving me messages all morning. And hey - you're still in therapy, right?"

"Yeah," Richie says blankly.

"Thank God," Nan says, and hangs up. Richie lets the phone fall to the table with a clatter, and lets his breath out in a long, frustrated wave.

"Well that sounded fucking terrible," Bill comments. He's already almost finished with his coffee.

"I guess I'm bisexual now," Richie says dully, and to his horror, feels his throat closing up with emotion. Bill squeezes his shoulder again and keeps his hand there until Richie gets himself under control, leaning his face in his hands and doing the deep breathing thing that Bev had taught him at the hospital, when they were waiting to hear if Stan would make it through the surgery.

When he's relatively calm, Bill nudges his shoulder and says, "I'm gonna get a refill. Do you want a cake pop?"

Richie laughs out loud, genuinely this time. "Yeah. Buy me a fucking cake pop, Bill."

"I'm gonna get you one of the ones with sprinkles on it," Bill promises with a grin, and squeezes his shoulder as he leaves.

Richie scrolls through his emails while Bill is at the counter, frowning morosely at the array of messages from pretty much everyone he knows. He can actually track the progression of the leak by the subject lines: _just checking in_ turning into _we need to talk_ and _please call ASAP._ His nerdy hookup has emailed to apologize - nice of him really, he's not a terrible guy overall, Richie feels kinda bad - and Mike's sent him a message, time stamped early this morning with a subject line that says _Love you, read when you're ready_ , and Richie just _knows_ it's gonna make him cry. He saves that one for later.

Most of his texts had been recovered onto the new phone, but Richie hasn't redownloaded the Twitter app, for his own sake. He hovers over his lawyer's name in his contacts for a long time, and then scrolls right past it and calls Bev.

"Hey sweetie," Bev says right away, tense and weird, picking up in the middle of what sounds like a bar fight. Richie is instantly alarmed. "I'm so glad you called!"

"Bev, are you okay?" Richie asks. He can he's on speakerphone by the echo-y sound of her voice, and on her side of the line, somebody is yelling - a woman, clearly, by the register of her voice. Another voice is speaking at the same time, lower and relatively calmer, but Richie can't make out any of the words. "Where the fuck are you, are you safe?"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," Bev says, still speaking a little too loudly, like she wants everyone around her to hear what she's saying. "Ben's here with me! We're at Eddie's place, actually. Good timing!"

"Oh," Richie says, his heart dropping into his stomach. He looks around for Bill, but he's still stuck only halfway through the line at the register, preoccupied with his own phone. "Is he okay? I didn't, uh, I didn't know that was going down today - "

Bev interrupts him with an incongruous laugh, still on the edge of too loud. Richie can hear her nerves in it, jangling loud and clear. "That's so funny, Richie! Oh, of _course_ you can talk to Eddie - _he's right here!_ " Richie winces, listening to the woman - Myra, obviously - screech something angry and offended. She sounds a lot like the stray cat that used to hang around in his neighborhood, which would hiss and loudly attack the wasp nest by the dumpster every single morning at 2 AM, like clockwork. "Eddie, it's Rich," he hears Bev hiss, "he's on the phone. Yes, just take it, we'll keep - "

There's a sort of shuffling sound, and then the call cuts off abruptly. Richie pulls the phone away from his face to double check, his heart pounding in his chest, and before he can even react a call pops up again, Bev's phone ringing him back. Richie doesn't even let it get through the first ringtone before he answers.

"Hey, Eds," he greets, grinding his knuckles into his leg so his voice doesn't shake.

"Hey," Eddie says back, wobbly and so obviously upset it makes Richie's head hurt. "Hey, Rich, it's really...good that you called. Um, right now."

The yelling is still there in the background; sounds like Ben has finally lost his cool. Richie hears it get fainter and fainter, though, and pictures Eddie walking away, into another room, or onto a balcony. Does Eddie have a balcony? Richie hopes he does. He hopes he's had a whole floor to himself, all these years. In Derry, at his mother's house, he hadn't even had a bedroom - Sonia had taken the door off its hinges the minute Eddie got tall enough to push furniture in front of it to keep her out. "So today's the day for big life changes, huh? Fuck. We should all buy lottery tickets or something."

"Yeah," Eddie says, clearing his throat, trying to get himself under control. Richie wants to see his face so bad his palms are itching.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm fine," Eddie says, clearing his throat again. "Ben and Bev are here to help me pack up my stuff. She showed up about twenty minutes ago - she said that she'd be gone the whole day but of course she couldn't let it go." He sounds a bit calmer now, a bit more like himself, and Richie's shoulders relax. "I really am glad you called. I needed the excuse to step out."

"Bev could probably tell," Richie says gently. He looks over at Bill again and catches his eye, motioning to the phone and mouthing 'Eddie left Myra' across the lobby of the coffee shop. Bill raises his eyebrows and mouths 'holy shit' back at him.

"Yeah man, I haven't seen her like this since that day she kicked the shit out of Vince Taylor. Do you remember? That kid with the mohawk that used to shoot spitballs at Ben in math?"

"Fuck that little asshole, yes I remember him," Richie says. "He knocked up Heather Matheson and then left her high and dry when he went away for college."

"That must've been after I moved, I don't remember that," Eddie says absently. "Shit. Shit, Ben was yelling at her too." Richie hears him laugh a little incredulously. "I don't think I've ever heard Ben's outside voice before."

"You weren't the one staying in the room next to his at the Townhouse," Richie says. "Those last couple of nights? When he and Bev - "

"Beep beep, Rich!"

"Hey, you're the one who's about to go stay at his house, Eds, I'm just warning you."

"Yeah, that's me," Eddie says, ignoring the nickname completely, to Richie's surprise. "Sleeping on my friend's couch, unemployed, about to get divorced - "

"You could go back if you wanted," Richie says with a scoff. "They put you on leave, they didn't fire you."

"You've never worked in an office before, have you?" Eddie asks wryly. "It's the same thing, Richie. Unpaid leave is the polite way of firing somebody. They're just keeping you on your health insurance while you look for another job."

"Fuck you, I temped all the way through my twenties," Richie says, nodding at Bill as he makes his way back over, coffee and cake pop in hand. "At least...eight solid years of semi-regular office employment."

"Yeah I'm sure all those dentist offices and insurance firms were overjoyed to have your receptionist services," Eddie says, and Richie laughs, feeling like a human being for the first time since Bill had stomped through his doorway that morning. "Did you have an office Voice? I wanna hear your office Voice."

"I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid that request isn't currently compatible with our business needs at this time," Richie says, going for a _Dolly Parton in 9 to 5_ thing, and Eddie laughs gratifyingly loud. "I'd be happy to take your contact information and the board will reconsider your application in approximately seven to fourteen business days."

"You sound like an alien who's trying to imitate how humans speak," Eddie says.

"Not an inaccurate statement," Richie replies. He grins at Bill. "Big Bill wants to say hi. We're at Starbucks."

"Hi Bill," Eddie says.

Richie holds the phone up to Bill, who leans in and says "hi Eddie, congrats on your divorce," in a comically loud voice, like an old man who doesn't understand how phones work.

"I'm not actually divorced _yet,_ " Eddie says, which Richie can hear clearly even without the phone held up to his ear. All Eddie _has_ is an outside voice. Richie would pay money to see him try to be polite at a theatre, or - better yet - a funeral.

"But you will be soon, and that's what's important," Richie says, pulling the phone back. "Is she still yelling?"

Eddie pauses. "No. Just...talking."

Richie would also pay money to be a fly on the wall of that conversation - Ben and Bev vs. Myra Kaspbrak. Showdown of the century. "You can pretend I'm your mistress if you want," he says impulsively, ignoring the way Bill's sudden double take. "Start talking loudly about how hot I am, that'll really piss her off."

"Are you kidding? Adultery would nullify our prenup," Eddie hisses. Then he makes another weird sound, like he's remembering something he didn't want to think about. "Oh shit. Fuck, Rich, you called to talk to Bev, didn't you? I'm sorry - "

"Nah, don't worry about it."

"Here I am going on about myself and - are _you_ alright?" The concern in Eddie's voice makes Richie want to curl up in the fetal position, but also like he wants to run around the block fifteen times while yelling at the top of his lungs. "I can go get her if you want to talk."

"I'm talking to _you,_ Eds," Richie says, smiling painfully down at the table. He very deliberately doesn't look over at Bill.

"Still, she's better at me at this stuff."

"What stuff? Emotions?"

"Yeah," Eddie says, with a dry little laugh. "And talking about them."

"There's always time to improve," Richie says. "Hey, look, Eddie. It's a good thing you're doing right now. It's a big thing. Don't worry about me. We can talk later."

"Rich," Eddie says heavily. Meaningfully, and Richie holds his breath, both afraid and hopeful that Eddie is about to say something really sappy, like _I always knew and it didn't matter to me,_ or _you know I support you no matter what_. Eddie takes a deep breath before he speaks, and Richie closes his eyes, braced for it. "I didn't look at your dick pics."

"Well hey, Eds, thanks," Richie says, laughing incredulously. "Thanks for that."

"And if you need a lawyer I know like twelve or thirteen really good ones," Eddie says fiercely.

"I have my own lawyer."

"You have a lawyer? A Hollywood lawyer? Fuck that," Eddie says. "New York lawyers are better. New York lawyers will take the asshole who leaked all that shit to the _cleaners._ I'll email you some phone numbers."

"Okay," Richie says indulgently.

"Okay," Eddie says. He pauses. "I should go."

"Yeah."

"Call me later," Eddie says.

"Yeah," Richie says again, smiling so widely it's sort of embarrassing, especially in front of Bill. He fusses with his coffee cup as he hangs up, avoiding looking over until the very last second, in case he's got some smug look on his face or something, but all Bill does is smile blandly, like he's been doing all morning. Tagging along with him all over the city, saying boring, supportive things all morning, avoiding anything that might come off as judgmental or opinionated at all. Fucking Big, Beautiful Bill. Richie's missed him fiercely all these years, even though he didn't remember. "Ben and Bev are with him. He just needed a break. Sounded intense."

"I bet you cheered him up," Bill says, just as neutral as he's been all day. Richie could cry, he's so grateful. "Here. I think it's chocolate." He hands Richie the pastry bag with the cake pop in it.

Richie pulls it out and eats the entire thing in one giant bite, sliding it off the little stick with his teeth. "It's red velvet, motherfucker," he says, with his mouth full. Bill laughs at him.

"So where to next? You need to make some more calls?" Bill asks.

"I mean, yeah. But you don't have to hang out with me all day, man, I'm fine," Richie says. "You don't need to babysit me."

"Who says I'm babysitting? Maybe I'm trying to avoid my own life for another day."

"Your own life? You mean your movie star wife and your gigantic mansion?" Richie says, which is sort of mean, and he knows it. "Come on, Billy."

Bill frowns at him. "Audra's in London. Which is where I _would_ be, if I hadn't gotten fired off of my own fucking movie a week ago." He sighs morosely. "And the mansion is terrible, dude. It's huge and there's always cleaning people there, it's not private. Paparazzi hang out by the front gate all the time, none of the rooms are comfortable. I actually don't like living there very much, and neither does she, but the market is shit right now, she hasn't been able to find a buyer. She's been trying for like three years."

"I hear that's an issue, with custom-built multimillion dollar homes," Richie says archly. He reaches out and nudges Bill with his knee. "You wanna stay with me? Just until she gets back? Is that what you're asking?"

"I don't wanna impose."

"If it makes you feel better we can call it babysitting," Richie says. "I was lying before. I am definitely going to turn on The Cure and burrow into my bed like a weevil the second you leave."

"Oh, well if I can keep you from The Cure, then fine," Bill says, nudging him back. "Thanks, man."

"You're welcome," Richie says. He takes a drink of his lukewarm latte, just so he has something to do with his hands. "I appreciate you spinning this like I'm doing _you_ a favor. You're very good at this friendship thing."

"You _are_ doing me a favor, Richie," Bill says, so earnestly that Richie cringes on his behalf.

"Yeah, whatever you say, you fuckin' Boy Scout," Richie says.

It's not as if Richie didn't know that this sort of thing could happen; for the last five years or so, he's actually been pretty indiscreet on purpose, hoping in a lazy way that somebody will slip up or post about it online and the issue will take care of itself. So in a way, this is exactly what he'd wanted. Very in character for him to have not thought it all the way through, in terms of how terrible it turns out to be.

He loses some gigs, which is fine. A club owner in Orlando, a guy Richie has always had a good relationship with - and long standing, too, he used to perform there on a regular basis before he hit it big, and he tried his best after he got successful to throw some of that coin back - emails him something passive-aggressive and nasty, which is a total fucking bummer, since Richie had actually thought they were friends. Quite a few famous people tweet at him in support, and a few more text him privately to yell at him for compromising their private phone numbers, which is also a bummer. There is never a good time to receive a "you're an asshole" text from fucking Ike Barinholtz, of all people.

Steve is supportive in an _extremely_ awkward way, transitioning from misogynistic inside jokes to an attempt at gay inside jokes, which in the end usually just comes across as either homophobic or inappropriately sexual. Richie tells him to relax about it, which seems to just make him even weirder about it, and finally they stop talking on the phone altogether and stick to stilted business emails, which is probably for the best for everyone. Especially since Richie isn't exactly working at the moment, to get technical about it.

"Voice work," Bill suggests, living on Richie's couch in a pair of faded flannel sweatpants and a series of 80s band t-shirts that Richie is starting to suspect are actually those expensive vintage tour shirts they sell for eighty dollars a pop on the Strip. "Take a break from stand up. Do something low key, something hip. Audition for something LA-based."

"Nan wants me to date someone," Richie says sourly. "She keeps sending me phone numbers for twentysomething male models."

"Not a terrible idea," Bill says carefully. "Maybe not a twentysomething. But you could go out - that guy that was in your phone, maybe…?"

Richie scowls. "That guy is closeted too, Bill." It had been a common thread in most of his relationships with men, for pretty much most of his adult life.

"Someone else, then. Doesn't have to be a date, but you should go out and be seen," Bill urges. "We should go to Knott's Berry Farm!"

"Fuck you," Richie sputters, laughing.

"Just dinner then," Bill replies, grinning triumphantly, obviously proud of himself that he'd gotten a laugh. "Let's get your sad ass out of this house."

Which is how Richie accidentally starts the rumor that he's sleeping with Bill - completely unintentional, but in hindsight they probably should've known better. Especially Bill, who is the married one, and married to a _very_ famous person, no less, who has recently been photographed out and about in London with various people she's not married to either. Richie is pretty sure Bill was the one the paps were after, for that very reason.

The photos are completely innocuous if you know Bill at all, and more specifically if you know his tendency to mother hen - he'd reached out a couple times to brush something off Richie's shirt, which looked way more romantic in a photo still than it had in real life - and later on, as they were waiting for their car, he'd reached up and and ruffled Richie's hair, which had quickly turned into a noogie and then a wrestling match. For _some_ weird reason, though, that part of the interaction hadn't made it into the TMZ article.

"Look at us," Richie says, scrolling through the photos on his phone as they smoke a bowl together the next morning on Richie's balcony. "We look like a couple of gay dads out on date night."

"Aw," Bill says, his voice strained as he holds the smoke inside his lungs. "That's sweet."

"No, I'm actually saying we look middle aged and frumpy," Richie says, snatching the pipe out of Bill's hand while he's distracted. "You have old man glasses, Bill."

Bill takes the frames off his face and squints at them. He'd lost his contacts a few days into their extended sleepover, and neither of them have been able to muster the energy needed to drive all the way down to his optometrist's in Irvine to get him a new prescription. "I bought them ironically," he says, sliding them back on his face. They're large and thick framed, with that sort of diamond square shape that was popular in the 80s. He looks eerily like his dad whenever he wears them. "Audra thinks they're funny."

"Have you talked to her?" Richie asks carefully. The photos of Audra in London that had sparked the separation rumors in the first place had been fairly innocent, but whatever, Richie doesn't know their life. Bill's been pretty tight-lipped about it, including whatever it was that happened that had gotten him fired from the movie. Richie assumes it was a bigger issue than disappearing to Maine for a couple weeks and not being able to come up with an ending that everyone liked.

"Yeah, we're talking," Bill says with a shrug. He's loose limbed and floppy like he always gets when he's high, draped indecently over one of Richie's deck chairs, his hair a greasy bird's nest on top of his head. He looks like a creepy math teacher or something, with how long it's getting. "I dunno, man. She knows nothing's going on with you - I mean, obviously she knows I'm straight. She's not jealous or anything, but she's still sorta…" Bill sighs. "I haven't told her anything about Derry. Or what happened to Stan. All I said was that you guys are old friends from high school that I've been reconnecting with, which she seems really weirded out by."

"We're a little intense for 'old friends from high school,'" Richie agrees. They've all been talking to each other constantly, since they left Derry. It's like none of them can bear to go more than an hour without reminding everyone else that they exist. It's actually been sort of comforting, if not a little codependent.

"She's suspicious. And I mean, I get it." Bill sits up abruptly. "You talked to Stan last night, right?"

"Yeah, man, he's doing better," Richie says. It still doesn't mean that he's _good._ But still better than the alternative.

"He texted me the other day and asked me not to call him at his house. I guess Patty's a little…" Bill shrugs again, helplessly. "Did he ask you the same thing?"

"Yeah," Richie says, swallowing. "That's different, though, Billy. He tried to…" Richie still can't even say it. "And then immediately after, he checks himself out of the hospital and flies across the country and gets fucking _impaled_ , and he can't explain how. Of _course_ she doesn't want him talking to us, she probably thinks we're a death cult or something."

"We'd make a really shitty death cult," Bill says.

"True, we're all pussies," Richie says, taking a hit off the pipe so big his eyes start to water. He coughs a few times, pounding his chest. He's getting too old to smoke anything, really, but Bill has some kind of old school weed snob grudge against edibles, so. "Hey you know - the upside to getting publicly outed in a super embarrassing way is that my friends' wives all feel sorry for me instead of hating me."

"Audra definitely feels sorry for you," Bill agrees. "But I think Patty probably hates you."

"Ouch."

"She'll grow out of it," Bill replies, patting his arm. Then he steals the pipe back.

It's weird with Stan, because Stan's in a weird place, and while they all feel very secure in the love they feel for each other, Patty isn't necessarily part of it - nor does she want to be - and Stan obviously feels all fucked up and guilty about that, so they're all attempting to be sensitive. Balancing that with their intense desire to be reassured of his health every couple of hours is a hell of a thing to pull off, especially since none of them had been allowed to visit him in the ICU in Bangor and so the last time most of them saw him in person had been in the sewers. None of them are coping very well with that part.

It feels like they're all in an eerie holding pattern, bracing for the next hit. Whatever menacing force had stolen their memories has left a sort of power vacuum, it seems like, and the delicate neuroses that had been holding up their lives are now crashing down around them, all at once. In an effort to save her reputation - and a preemptive strike against whatever the fuck her ex is going to say about her, or Ben, or her _and_ Ben - Bev goes public about the abuse a few days after Eddie officially files for divorce, writing an op-ed on Medium that instantly goes viral, and they all spend a week or two having tearful phone calls with her. Richie finds himself tearing up just thinking about it, even when Bev finally gets to the joking stage and starts making fun of him for being a cry baby.

"I've always been the cry baby of the group, it's time to admit it," Richie tells her.

"Real men aren't afraid to cry," Bev says comfortingly. "Remember how weird Bill's dad would get about it?"

Zack Denbrough had really done a number on his wife and son after Georgie's death; Bev hadn't been privy to the finer details of that particular dysfunction. Richie doesn't hold it against her, but he's still not feeling great about joking about it. "Does Ben cry?" he deflects. "When you make sweet love to him?"

"Every time," Bev says, not missing a beat. "Sometimes we have to stop in the middle to cuddle until he calms down."

"Aw, Ben," Richie says. "I know you're joking but if you told me that in all seriousness, I would believe it. He's so fucking sweet."

"Yeah," Bev says fondly. "I think we're gonna buy a house. I miss California, and Ben doesn't really care where we live."

"You guys don't want to stay in New York?"

"We want a fresh start," Bev says, and then pauses meaningfully. "Eddie's not sure if he wants to stay, either."

"Ah," Richie says. "Yeah, he mentioned he was thinking about relocating."

"Yeah, you guys have been talking a lot recently," Bev says, so neutral that it comes out sounding the opposite of neutral.

"Uh," Richie says, "yeah."

"Maybe you could, uh," Bev continues, " _lean_ on him a little."

"Lean on him to do what?" Richie asks. His voice cracks embarrassingly, which Bev kindly does not comment on.

"Oh, I don't know, whatever," Bev says, faux-casual. "Follow us out to LA. We'd all be in the same place that way - except for Mike and Stan. And Stan's got Patty, you know, and Mike's definitely the most emotionally stable out of all of us."

"Mike's gonna become one of those annoying ex-pats that the locals always hate," Richie says quickly, not wanting to focus too long on the prospect of Eddie moving to California. Eddie living close enough to drive to? Eddie living _in his city?_ It's like trying to win the lottery; it'll drive Richie nuts. "He's gonna be a thinkpiece writer. He's gonna start a blog about healthy living and traveling on a budget."

"Good for him," Bev says genuinely. "Did you watch the vlog he posted last night?"

"Don't call it a 'vlog,' Beverly, this isn't 2005," Richie says. "And of course I watched it."

"He looks so good," Bev says warmly, ignoring Richie's frantic, deflective humor completely, as she usually does. "Healthy, you know?"

Mike's only posted about five YouTube videos so far, most of them less than ten minutes long, but he's already got a couple thousand followers. Richie rewatches them sometimes late at night when he's high or anxious; listening to Mikey giving a mini history lesson on whatever niche subject he's decided to talk about, with a beautiful vacation background behind his head, is probably the most calming thing Richie's discovered that doesn't require a doctor's prescription.

"Yeah," he says, in resignation. "He really does."

"Onward and upward," Bev says fondly.

"Even if it kills us," Richie replies. Surviving Derry has given them all a new dark twist to their senses of humor; Bev doesn't even beep him.

All through this latest episode of Richie's comically awkward life, he talks to Eddie. On the phone, most nights, and some mornings too, when Richie is up late enough to catch Eddie just as he's waking up in New York. Eddie, who'd been the last to leave Derry, lingering at the hotel until Richie finally had to give in to Steve's increasingly irate emails and book a flight out. Lingering like he was avoiding going home, which was the horrible truth that they'd all been too polite to mention to him out loud.

It's not like Richie hadn't caught on, at least minimally, that Eddie's marriage wasn't a very happy one. But underneath the surface level, comically Oedipian appearance of it was a whole other layer of fucked up that wasn't really funny at all, not even a little bit. Eddie and Richie had gotten wasted and talked about it, their last night in Maine, one on one at a Marriott hotel restaurant in Bangor, and it was in a lot of ways one of the worst conversations of Richie's life.

"This is what she does," Eddie had explained, showing Richie the text log with his wife, which was largely one-sided and deeply disturbing. They'd all known that Eddie was dodging Myra's calls, making thin excuses, but reading the actual texts, the actual messages that she'd been sending him, was something else entirely. "She melts down like this and then blames me. She'll blame me for this," Eddie had said blearily, leaning heavily over the table on one elbow. "I told her, didn't I? I told her that Stan tried to hurt himself, and that it was an emergency and I had to go. Even without all the - all the clown bullshit - that's a reasonable thing to ask, isn't it? Someone you were close to, someone you loved, when he does something like that...you just go. You just _go._ "

"Yeah, Eddie, of course that's reasonable," Richie said, with a sinking feeling that he was absolutely the wrong person for Eddie to confide in about this particular subject. "This is, um. This isn't good, Eds. You know this isn't good, right? These things that she's saying to you?"

"I'm not an idiot," Eddie said, but not irritably. It had sounded more like he was just tired. "I know it's fucked up. Before, when I didn't remember...it seemed like it was just what I was supposed to do. You know? It never occurred to me that I could do anything about it. It was like I was dreaming."

"You can do something about it now," Richie had told him, trying not to sound too eager, trying not to give anything away. He'd been trying, the whole time they'd been back, not to let it overwhelm him. Not to let himself sink into the feeling so far that he couldn't pull himself back out again, but of course it was hopeless. The second he'd remembered Eddie, the whole of who he was and what he'd meant to Richie, it was done. Richie's not the sort of person who lets people go, even when he really should. "You can leave her, if that's what you want. You should be with someone who makes you happy, man. We all should. Life's too fucking short." And Eddie had just looked at him, his eyes wide and serious in his face, his mouth turned downward like it did naturally. Even relaxed, even asleep, Eddie always looked like he was frowning a little, which always made Richie feel a little protective of him.

"I should," Eddie finally said, sliding his phone back and locking it, the screen going dark beneath the palm of his hand. "I need to think about it. I need to not be drunk when I make that decision."

"Yeah, dude, of course," Richie said mindlessly.

"But I feel like I _could_ make that decision now," Eddie continued. "Like before, I couldn't. Because I wasn't in my right mind, somehow. But now." He shrugged. "All bets are fucking off."

"Fuck yeah," Richie had said, which didn't _quite_ encompass the breadth of his pride and enthusiasm, but it was close. Eddie just gave him a weird look, and then signaled the waiter for another round.

On the phone, he's nothing like he is in person - warm, vulnerable, often nervous. He calls early in the morning mostly, when Richie is up late in California and Eddie is waking up in New York. Sometimes he's in the car, and it gives Richie a warm, invasive feeling to think of his own voice booming out of Eddie's car speakers. Maybe it's easier for them to talk this way; maybe if they'd had cell phones in 1991 they could've been there for each other in a way that Richie had always thought they weren't capable of. He used to think that it was the only way he could show his feelings for someone: by teasing them. Obfuscating it, wrapping it up layers of bullshit and deflection. Even the few people Richie has loved in the past thirty years never got to hear him actually _say_ it. But with Eddie, it's incredibly easy - go fucking figure. _I'm proud of you_ and _you deserve to be happy_ aren't all that scary when you can't see the face of the man you're saying them to.

"I don't know, it's not like I resent them," Eddie says, one night-slash-morning when Richie is maybe a little too high to be having a serious conversation, but Eddie never seems to mind. "It's not like they're rubbing it in my face, either. They just, you know, they kiss and hug and make each other laugh, and..."

"And they're happy, man," Richie completes the thought. He's lying on his balcony so he won't wake up Bill, who has taken to passing out in front of his laptop in the living room. His downstairs neighbor is having a party, which makes Richie feel like he has some sense of anonymity, lost in the background of someone else's main plotline. It's a rarity, these days. Richie's never been this famous before. Nobody is ever this famous until something this humiliating happens; 'vulgar pussy joke comedian is secretly a flamer' is the type of schadenfreude that Hollywood eats up with a spoon. He's been papped three times in as many weeks. "It's okay to resent them, you know. It's okay to be jealous of that kinda stuff - you're getting divorced. It's not like they wouldn't understand."

"I'm happy for them," Eddie insists. "It's Ben and Bev. They're like, beautiful together." He sighs, and it sounds sort of echo-y over the speaker. "They're moving to California, you know."

"They told me." Richie bites back what he wants to say, which is to scream _AND WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA DO, EDUARDO?_ at the top of his lungs, and instead says, "Bill and I are really excited. Four way sleepovers, Eds! Not sexy ones. I mean, unless everyone is into it."

"Is he still 'percolating' on your couch?" Eddie asks. That's the term Bill had used, the last time Richie had dared to ask him just what the fuck was up with him and Audra. _We're percolating,_ he'd said. Three guesses what they'd been smoking at the time and the first two don't count. "What a dweeb."

"I don't think he wants to stay at Audra's house alone," Richie says, which is a little more honest than what he'd been planning to say. He swallows back the lump in his throat, which gets a little smaller but doesn't ever completely go away. "Don't think he wants me to be alone right now, either."

"Richie," Eddie says softly. A beat of silence, and then he hears Eddie take another breath, like he's gearing up to say something. "You should sue that piece of shit Josh guy."

Richie guffaws, and unclenches his hands. Not exactly what he'd been bracing himself for. "He can say whatever he wants."

"He can't just keep talking shit about you, like - you were only twenty-two when you dated! What the fuck did he expect, emotional maturity? Everybody's a shithead to their boyfriends when they're twenty-two, Jesus, doesn't mean you go around making fucking YouTube videos about it when you're _forty_."

"That's sort of his job now," Richie says, still laughing. "He's a YouTuber. He YouTubes. My ex is a YouTuber." He giggles, staring at the roof above him, the tiny spider web that's stubbornly hanging on in the corner. "I hear he also does podcasts."

"They're bad. They're terrible, Rich," Eddie says, which makes him laugh again since the idea of Eddie angrily Google-stalking Richie's ex-boyfriend is hilarious on its own merits. "You _could_ sue him. You should. Quit laughing, I'm fucking serious."

"I'm not gonna sue him, Eds. It's not like he's saying anything that isn't true." He hasn't stopped laughing. If anything, this conversation has only gotten funnier since Eddie's solution to everything, Richie has been learning, is threatening to sue. Everything from problems at work to bad neighbors to car accidents. He's the type of guy who angrily threatens legal action at the slightest inconvenience and then never follows through. Like a suburban dad who makes scenes at chain restaurants. God, Richie fucking loves him. "I watched a few. They're fine. They're whatever, you know? He's probably been waiting a long time to say those things about me. I didn't treat him very well, and it's not like _he_ outed me. He's kept quiet all these years, even when he could've made some money if he hadn't, which says something about him I think."

"So your response is 'he's not quite as big of a dickhead as he could've been' and that's it?" Eddie scoffs. "Richie, it doesn't _matter_ if it's true. It doesn't matter how you treated him twenty years ago, because it was _twenty years ago._ It's a shitty thing to do to put it on the internet like that. It's shitty of him to talk about you right now, what with how it happened."

Richie finds himself choking up, weirdly, because this isn't even something that's been bothering him. Really and truly, on the list of things that have fucking bothered him in the past few weeks, Josh's videos hadn't even blipped the radar. "I cheated on him, Eddie. With a woman my agent set up for me, because people were starting to talk. I did that."

Eddie doesn't say anything for a long moment, but Richie can hear him breathing. "You were a kid," he finally says, in a voice so tremulously earnest it makes Richie's heart seize. "Twenty-two, Rich. You were a fucking kid. They shouldn't have asked that of you. You shouldn't have had to live like that at all."

Richie closes his eyes, his body in 2017 and his mind in 1998 all of a sudden, the shitty little bedroom in a house he shared with three other comics, all of whom had been so aggressively masculine it made Richie feel twitchy and nervous constantly. Matthew Shepard was murdered in the fall of that year; Richie remembers it so clearly, the way that people talk about remembering 9/11, where they were and what they were doing. He was sitting on the couch in the living room, watching a news report about it when he was still in the hospital in critical condition, and one of Richie's roommates had walked by and casually wondered out loud when he was going to die. Richie spent the rest of the day in his bedroom having a slow motion panic attack.

He'd been the same age as Richie. They were born the same year. He remembers thinking about that a lot, when it happened.

"I think I'm gonna fire Steve," Richie says, instead of saying all of that. He wouldn't even know where to begin.

"Good," Eddie says fiercely.

"Nan, I'm gonna keep. She's been surprisingly supportive, in an asshole kind of way. Did I tell you she has a sister who's transgender?"

"No. How can someone be supportive in an asshole way?"

"I dunno Eds, you do it all the time, enlighten me," Richie says, and Eddie gives an offended scoff. "She got me an interview with someone who writes for New York Magazine."

"That's good. Isn't that one like the New Yorker?" Eddie asks endearingly. "Kinda literary, high class stuff?"

"Sure?" Richie guesses.

"Okay, we'll go with that. Good for you."

"It's the same as Vulture," Richie explains. "And The Cut. Pretend we both know these words as I'm saying them to you, Eddifer, act like we use the internet." Eddie obligingly makes agreeable, understanding noises. "They found a writer to do a _profile_ on me, which is different from just an interview for, I don't know, some reasons, and right now they're planning on putting it on Vulture, which is the hippest of all their hip websites, for your information. But Nan's trying to get them to put me in the actual print magazine, I guess."

"Was she really going to get you on Ellen?" Eddie asks skeptically. "Like I know that you're famous but are you really Ellen famous?"

"Ellen will take anybody," Richie says. "And she's an asshole. Don't tell me you're a fan."

"Myra watched her show. So no," Eddie says shortly. "She's really an asshole?"

"Totally fucking evil," Richie says. "Everyone in LA has a story. She's worse than Bill Maher, even, which is really saying something."

"You've met Bill Maher?"

"I did his show once. Would you like to know all the other famous people I've met?" Richie asks. "I've had this exact conversation with the rest of the Losers at least three times a piece by now. Bev was really impressed by my Ben Stiller story."

"I mean," Eddie says, "have you met Alan Alda?"

"What?" Richie laughs. "No."

"Because I have. So."

"You met Alan Alda?" Richie starts giggling again.

"Yeah, he stayed at the same hotel as me once, when I was in Chicago for work," Eddie says. "We ended up at the valet station together one morning. He's really nice." His voice turns comically smug. "So, you know. Bill Maher is like whatever."

"Alan Alda is absolutely superior to Bill Maher," Richie agrees, still laughing. "In like, every conceivable way. I agree."

"Was Stan impressed?" Eddie asks. "By any of your famous person stories?"

"Stan? Impressed?" Richie says, and Eddie laughs warmly. "No. No, he was not."

"Good," Eddie says, with immense, auditory satisfaction, like it's just made his morning that Stan had made an effort to pop Richie's ego, as usual. Richie laughs again, warm hearted and a little overwhelmed. "So you're coming to New York?"

Richie twitches suddenly, banging his knee against the side of his patio door. "Ouch. What?"

"For your interview. It's with _New York_ Magazine, right?"

This is at once so frustrating and endearing that Richie doesn't know how to respond for a second. "Eddie," he starts, at a momentary loss of how to explain the concept of telephones and emails and the current state of the freelance journalism industry, but then a wild thought overtakes his mind and he stops. "Um, yeah. Yes, I am. Coming to New York." _What?_ he mouths at himself.

"Cool," Eddie says. "When? Or do you not know yet?"

"Um, it's still early," Richie says weakly. "We don't have a date for the, um."

"Right," Eddie says. "Well, I don't know that you want to impose on Bev and Ben - I'm taking up enough of their space as it is. But maybe we could get a hotel or something. An AirBnb? I could take you to Montauk. Have you ever been there?"

Richie doesn't know how to respond to that, doesn't even know how to begin to respond to the concept of _getting a hotel together._ "Is that some kind of fish?"

"Montauk? No, Rich. No, it is a _town,_ " Eddie says witheringly. "It has beaches. A lighthouse. Expensive fucking seafood."

"Sounds more like a type of fish," Richie says stupidly. "I can't really picture you on a beach. Wait - yes I can. You're wearing a dad sweater."

"Shut up," Eddie says. "I'm hanging up on you now."

"No, no," Richie says, "hold on, it was a sweater _vest._ My bad. Khakis underneath, natch."

"You always make me sound like an 80s movie villain," Eddie complains, in a voice that's a little on the whiny side, which means that's _exactly_ what he wears to the beach, _ha._ "I take it back, I don't wanna hang out with you when you're here. You can go to the fucking farmer's market with Bev and Ben, asswipe."

"Oh my God, not the _farmer's market,_ " Richie says, grinning. A weird, floaty _fuck it_ sensation has appeared, sort of like that time he took an upper and then did an improvised ten minutes for Conan O'Brien's writing team. "It'll probably be in the next few weeks. It moves fast, when it happens, it's - I'll tell Nan she doesn't have to book me a room."

"Yeah, I'll take care of it," Eddie says casually, and Richie clenches his eyes shut, because he's just popped a half-boner. That's embarrassing. "Have you ever been to the Frick?"

"What is that, like a steakhouse?" Richie asks, and Eddie mutters something that's probably very New Yorker pompous. "I'd rather go see a Broadway show. Is Cats still playing? It has to still be playing, right?"

"Jesus Christ," Eddie says, "no."

"What about RENT? Seems appropriate."

"I'm gonna take you to see some Shakespeare and you're gonna shut the fuck up about it," Eddie says furiously, and Richie has to jerk his phone away from his mouth so Eddie doesn't hear the noise of delight that he makes. Because that's also embarrassing.

Bill takes the news skeptically, which Richie had been expecting, but clears out of his condo easily enough. "I suppose it's time," he says, dragging his feet like he used to when Richie's dad would get home and sternly ask him if his parents knew where he was. But then ten minutes later he's got his stuff packed in a duffel bag and he's talking about stopping for donuts on the way home.

"Do Golden Globe nominated actresses eat donuts?" Richie asks. He bought a one-way ticket approximately fifteen seconds after hanging up with Eddie, but he's now debating the wisdom of buying a return. He should have an out, right? Eddie should have an out too. Would it come off as forward if he doesn't have one? Either way the choice feels loaded.

"She was nominated for an Emmy, not a Golden Globe. Her last movie was nominated for an Oscar, but only for sound design so she doesn't think it counts," Bill says.

"Oh, okay," Richie says, like he was listening.

"And yes they do," Bill finishes, narrowing his eyes at Richie across the top edge of the laptop. "But she's gluten free, so the point is moot anyway."

"That's nice, Billy," Richie says.

"I'm gonna tell her I kissed Bev," Bill announces, which is shocking enough that it finally manages to tear Richie's eyes away from the American Airlines website. Bill makes a face like he regrets saying it the second they meet eyes. "Or is that stupid? I haven't decided."

"Uh," Richie says dumbly, having never been in a position to be consulted about relationship advice ever in his life, hetero or otherwise. "Are you asking generally or specifically in reference to you and Audra? Because it would affect my answer."

"You've never met Audra," Bill points out.

"Exactly my point," Richie says, and shuts the laptop. This feels like an important moment. "Why don't you sit down for a second, Big Bill? You're giving me a neck ache."

Bill takes a deep breath, lets it out, and then perches on the edge of a dining room chair. It occurs to Richie that this is probably the conversation that Bill's been wanting to have, ever since he turned up on Richie's doorstep three weeks ago. "She's cheated on me before," he says.

"Okay," says Richie neutrally. He waits for Bill to continue, but he just keeps frowning at his hands. "Should we get high? Would that help?"

"I have to drive home," Bill says.

"You can stay one more night."

"Audra gets back from England tomorrow," Bill says. He shakes his head. "No, I have to go back."

He looks sort of hunted about it. "You don't actually have to," Richie says cautiously. "I mean maybe we all assumed you knew this already? But you don't have to. You literally do not have to stay married to her, Bill. Not unless you _want_ to."

They sit with that one for a little bit, staring at the same patch of middle distance and frowning. Richie is a little uncomfortably reminded of the lunches he used to share with his dad before he died, when he'd go home for Yom Kippur and they'd both have to figure out how to talk to each other all over again.

"I'm not...sure," Bill says, in a weird tone of voice, "like about what I want, or what I should do. Which I feel like are two different things right now."

"What you want is what you should do," Richie says, earnestly meaning it. "When it comes to the person you spend every single day with, it should always come down to who you want it to be, Billy."

Bill sighs, turning to look out at the balcony, and the wide expanse of blue sky above it. "I'm gonna miss this view."

"Bill," Richie says, rolling his eyes. "You live in Malibu."

Bill just shakes his head, and when he turns back he's got a stubborn look on his face, like the one he always used to wear when he'd come to sternly tell Richie to apologize for something. Richie gets an instinctual twist in his stomach at the mere sight of it. "She cheated on me with a director two years ago, which was - not _fine_ with me exactly, but I mostly got over it, because we were separated at the time and I thought it didn't bother me that much. And it didn't at first, because I was mad at her and I thought she was about to leave me anyway, but then she didn't, she just apologized and dropped out of this big Spielberg project so we could go to couple's therapy, and - and you know, it got better for a while. It really did." He shrugs helplessly. "I love her, you know? I do. I just think sometimes, what if it's not the right kind of love? And what if I - if I stay, and now that I remember everything about who I am, it's like I could - let myself love her for real. But then what if I do that, and she doesn't love me back? She doesn't really know me. You know? She doesn't know about Georgie. She doesn't know about Derry. She thinks I'm having some kind of nervous breakdown right now, and maybe she's sort of right about that, but she thinks you guys are a bad influence and I don't know how the fuck to explain it to her that you're the opposite, because of course it seems crazy to someone who wasn't there. It _would_ be crazy, if it hadn't happened like it did."

"I don't, uh," Richie says, blinking rapidly and attempting to process all of _that_ quickly enough to form a coherent reply, "think that you necessarily need to know everything about somebody to love them, Bill."

"You don't? Really?"

"Do your parents know everything about you the second your mom shits you out into the world?" Richie asks. "No. All they know is that they made you, so they have to. Tough luck, getting born. No choice, really! Every baby is non-consensually birthed. But we're all here, and you know - my parents loved me. They didn't like me, and they didn't know what to do with me, and they sure as fuck didn't _know_ me. But they loved me."

Bill's shoulders slump. "That's depressing," he tells Richie. "And a little bit different from marriage."

"Not really," Richie says, something hot and itchy pressing against the sides of his throat. "Not really at all, Bill. I'm in love with Eddie, you know." Bill blinks, and doesn't look surprised at all, which is just a tiny bit insulting. But he reaches out his hand and touches Richie's wrist, grasping it gently between his fingers like he's preemptively stopping him from getting up and walking away, and he doesn't laugh or even smirk, for which Richie is pathetically, deeply grateful. "I don't think I know him all that well as a grown up yet. But I know...his insides. I know what makes him _Eddie._ And you know, that's more than enough." He stares hard at his closed laptop, matching sensations of embarrassment and shame rolling over him in waves. Bill waits him out patiently. "You've been married to her for six years, Billy. You honestly think she would stop loving you if she knew about Georgie? Or about what happened to us? You've gotta be fucking kidding me."

"I guess that's not really what I meant to say," Bill says hoarsely. The careful way he pronounces each word tells Richie that he's working hard on keeping the stutter away. "It's not that I'm afraid she won't love me. I think I'm afraid she won't...believe me."

Richie sighs, sliding his arm down so that Bill is holding his hand, instead of his wrist. "Only one way to find that out, buddy."

Bill nods jerkily. "Yeah."

They sit there for a minute, quivering together like the pair of candy-asses they are. Richie swallows back some anxious nausea and tries to come up with a joke, but it fuckin' figures that the first one that comes to mind is a mildly homophobic crack about how they're holding hands. For his own sake, Richie doesn't say it.

"Do you wanna know why I got fired from the movie?" Bill asks, after another painful minute.

"Obviously," says Richie, who has only asked him about a million times in the past few weeks.

"I called one of the executive producers a 'son of a whore bitch' and stormed out in the middle of a story meeting," Bill says.

Richie heroically keeps his grin under control. "Nice one."

"It was maybe a bad idea to go back so quickly," Bill admits. He's got a matching tiny grin of his own, though, so Richie doesn't think he's lost much sleep over it. "Audra probably smoothed it over for me. She keeps asking what I want the ending to be like, so I can still get what I want into the script, but I can't figure out how to tell her how little I give a fuck."

"I don't think anybody who's read your books will be all that surprised that you don't give a fuck about endings, Bill."

"Yeah," Bill says with a shrug. "It's like, the worst part of a story."

"Tell me about it," Richie says, emphatically.

Mike's YouTube channel is getting pretty popular already, because of course it is: he looks like a model. He's got a Hollywood face - handsome like the star of a crime show on ABC, classical features and big biceps. Bill's got weird dips in his nose and his face is sort of weaselly, and Richie himself looks like a combination of a cartoon beaver and a wax statue of Buddy Holly at Madame Tussauds, but Mike is just _good looking_ , in a comforting, high school principal sort of way. Plus he's funny and wry, he picks the weirdest stories, and he always drinks some kind of weird-looking cocktail while he talks, with flower-shaped pineapples or little novelty plastic toys clinging to the straw. He doesn't do those jump edits either, so you have to watch him pause and take breaths in-between sentences, stumble on his words sometimes, do all the normal things that you forget people do, when you watch too much YouTube. Richie is positive that he's watching an entirely new genre of internet creative content emerge, right before his eyes. 

His newest one is about an experimental Army program in the 1850s that attempted to train camels for military use, which is just about goofy enough to be totally true. Richie listens to this while he listlessly packs for his trip to New York. He's waffling about how many shoes to bring when Mike gets to the part where he always gets up to refill his drink and _leaves the camera running_ while he does it, which is hands down the funniest thing he's ever done. 

"Sorry, folks," Mike says. Richie takes his phone out of his pocket and takes a picture of the laptop screen to send to Bev, laughing. Mike's holding a platter of fancy-ass mozzarella sticks. There's a tomato garnish on the side of the plate cut in the shape of a flower. "Room service. You guys don't mind if I eat while I talk, right?" 

"No Mikey, I sure do not," Richie tells the screen. He gives up on the suitcase for the moment and settles in to learn some shit about Nevada. 

"I did that one kind of last minute," Mike says, two hours later once Richie's finally gotten him on the phone. Apparently Mike sleeps in now. What the fuck. "I was kind of in a rush, since I was only in Texas for a day and a half. Did you know there's this guy who keeps commenting on all the videos offering to loan me a 'three point lighting system'? Whatever that is."

"What the fuck do you think it is, Mike? It's a _lighting system._ " Richie laughs at him again. "It's supposed to make you look better on camera. Not that you need it, you fucking supermodel."

"Ah whatever," Mike says bashfully. "How do _you_ know that?"

"Uh, because I work in Hollywood?" Richie snorts. "He's right, you know. They're interesting, you're hot - if you actually put some effort into the videos you could probably take it somewhere. I'm serious, man, don't laugh."

"I'm not sure I want to take it anywhere," Mike says. "I'm just messing around."

"Fair enough. If you ever change your mind though, I have plenty of odious people in my new phone I can hook you up with," Richie offers. "For you, Mikey, I'd even call my ex."

"Oh, fuck that guy," Mike exclaims. "The one who keeps making those shittalking videos about you? No thanks. I can't believe you even have his number still."

"I didn't until yesterday! He texted me. He probably got my number from Steve. It was sort of an apology," Richie says ruefully. "Or maybe a heads up that he was gonna talk about our sex life in his next video. Or both."

"You didn't tell Eddie about that, did you?"

"Not yet?" Richie frowns. "Why, should I have?"

"Uh," says Mike, laughing sort of weirdly, "maybe not. Just wondering." He sighs. "I downvote his videos when I see them. The prick. And Bev and Eddie are right, you probably _could_ sue if you wanted. Or at least send him one of those cease and desist letters or something."

"Nan thinks it'll just encourage it. More attention, which is the opposite of what I want." Richie frowns at his lunch, a sad-looking leftover box of chicken. He's been eating way worse since Bill left. "I appreciate the solidarity though. It's like community service for you guys or something. Defending your sad queer friend from his mean ex-boyfriend."

"Don't use that word about yourself."

"It's a good word now, Mikey," Richie insists. "People major in it."

"They major in being gay?" Mike asks. He still sounds less than amused.

"Queer Studies," Richie says, in his Professor Voice, which is Boston accented and very nasal. It has, until recently, only been used during a really horrible bit about his sex tape being studied for academic purposes - it almost never got decent laughs - but Richie finds that it feels like a very natural Voice for conversations with Mike. "Studies on the state of being queer."

"RIght. I mean, I knew that," Mike says. He yawns audibly. "I just. It didn't seem like that's how you were using it, just now."

Richie takes a second, swallows hard. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Sometimes it's still hard to tell. "Well," he says, and flounders for a second, unable to think of anything funny to say. "We're getting old. All the slurs are reclaimed now."

"Some of them," Mike says darkly. He's quiet for a second too, clearing his throat. Mike's always been easy to talk to; his silences never felt loaded. Richie was always a little bit more at ease with letting them sit, than he was with the others. "Did you text the guy back? Your ex."

Richie snorts. "No." He feels a little unsettled, for some weird reason, and pushes the food away with a grimace. "Why, you think I should?"

"No, I was actually hoping you'd say that," Mike says. "Anyone who does something like that to you doesn't deserve your time, Rich."

That's a little too sweet for Richie to take right now. "I sort of deserved it, though."

"No, you didn't," Mike says flatly. 

"I kind of - "

"Just shut the fuck up," Mike says. "You didn't. Don't say anything else, just sit with that for a minute, okay? As a favor to me. You don't deserve any of this."

Richie blinks at his dining room table, his eyes watering. He feels like his heart is suddenly too big for his chest.

"All of this shit, Rich - listen," Mike says, with a heavy sigh, "it's not fair. I know Eddie's been telling you this over and over, and probably Bill too - but I've been reading some of these headlines, and the stuff people are saying about you on Twitter and stuff and it's not - it's cruel. Okay? It doesn't matter what kind of boyfriend you were or whatever it is you keep telling us. It's just cruel and unfair." He sighs again. "We'll keep telling you that until you believe it, man, but I kind of wish you wouldn't keep brushing it off like you've been doing. For your own sake, if nothing else."

"Ah, Mikey," Richie says, struggling to keep his voice even. It's not like he hasn't been keeping up with it all. Nan's been uncharacteristically gentle, sending him little summary updates and texting him heads up warnings whenever there's something particularly vindictive that goes up. Last week, a blogger from Jezebel wrote a hit piece that Nan told him never to read under any circumstances, "I'm not kidding Rich, you don't want it in your head," which had prompted Bev into some angry tweeting that Richie is unspeakably grateful for. And it's not like Bill was being very subtle, posting all those long, heartfelt captions under the photos of Richie he kept putting on Instagram. 

"You don't have to say anything, I just wanted you to know what I've been thinking," Mike says after a second, earnest as anything. "We love you, man. Don't forget."

"I know. I know that. I wouldn't forget it, not this time," Richie manages, leaning his forehead against his palm and breathing deeply. "Man, fuck you. All I was calling about was the fucking camel video, and now I'm fucking crying."

Mike laughs warmly, sounding a little teary himself. "Sorry."

"No, you're not," Richie accuses. 

"No, I'm not," Mike agrees easily. He chuckles again, a familiar sound that Richie remembers deep in his body from when they were kids, that gentle little laugh that is such an intrinsic _Mike_ sound that it always hits Richie with a wave of memories, like how people talk about the smell of their mother's cooking, or those videos of old people hearing recordings of their dead parents talking. "You know, I forgot to include my favorite part about the camels in the video. They released some of them into the wild after the program ended, and every once in a while they would pop up on someone's property and scare the shit out of some poor homesteader who'd never seen a camel before in their life. There's a letter from a settler in New Mexico, writing to her sister in Missouri, that talks about seeing a 'monster with a blobbish head and a long and curvy neck and two terrible lumps on its back' roaming around the back of her barn."

Richie laughs. "You should make a follow up video," he says. "I bet there's tons of examples of that. People trying to describe shit they've never seen before, and making it sound like a monster."

"Yeah," Mike says. "Or...people were just seeing monsters. I mean, it's not like we don't know for a fact that they exist, or anything."

"Don't bring down the vibe, man, I'm trying to lighten the mood here."

"Sorry," Mike says. 

Richie's been to New York so many times over the course of his career that it feels like a weird flashback to his life before all of this, landing at JFK, fighting for a spot at the baggage claim, keeping his sunglasses on so he doesn't get papped even though it's dark with rain clouds outside and he looks like an asshole.

Eddie picks him up, which is sort of awkward, and then takes Richie back to his office building with him because he has a conference call, which is _super_ fucking awkward. It's gigantic and terrifying inside, and looks _very_ similar to the skyscraper in Die Hard. It even has an outdated computer directory and everything.

He's also grown a beard, Richie is both frightened and delighted to discover. Well, more of a goatee-beard hybrid, really. It elongates his face and makes him look like the villain in a kid's movie. Richie's never liked men with facial hair all that much, but over the past hour Richie has experienced a double whammy emotional and sexual awakening, not unlike the one he experienced while watching Antonio Banderas in _Law of Desire_ for the first time at a pretentious film school dorm party in 1994.

"Stop staring at my chin," Eddie says sourly.

"No," Richie says, reaching out to scratch at the facial hair, not unlike he would with a dog. Eddie slaps his hand away with a scowl. "Is that dress code, Edjamin?"

"No. But they're firing me, so whatever," Eddie says.

"Everyone here is wearing a skinny tie," Richie says, with the tone of a man who has looked his fading youth in the eye and been told to fuck off. "Is there a single person you work with who didn't attend an Ivy League? Be honest, Eddie."

"Probably not," Eddie says, not looking up from his email. "Are you sure you don't want to just do your own thing for the afternoon? I won't be offended, I promise. You can leave your bag here."

"And do what?" Richie asks, poking around curiously. There's a box of things on a giant credenza with a post-it note on the outside that says _PERSONAL EFFECTS_ in Eddie's blocky handwriting, and next to it is an even bigger box that says _CRAP._ The CRAP box is almost entirely file folders, aside from a pile of 'farewell' and 'best wishes' Hallmark cards on top that feel very pointedly placed. "Wander around like in Home Alone? No thanks."

"That is _the_ worst Home Alone movie, and I'm disappointed in you for referencing it."

"It's actually the best, Eds, and I'm sad for you that you don't agree," Richie says absently. He picks up a baseball in a glass cube out of the PERSONAL EFFECTS box, turning it over to see an autograph personally addressed to Eddie and dated _September 20, 2010._ Richie was in rehab, then. "What the fuck is this? Did you tell everyone here that you like sports?"

"Carl Crawford did a charity thing with our firm, he gave them to everyone," Eddie says. His office is sad and beige and bare; he's been working out his last month from home for the most part, wrapping up some mysterious and confusing loose ends on a project that Richie literally cannot understand no matter how many times Eddie tries to explain futures contracts to him. There's already a bookcase in the corner that belongs to the new occupant, with some nonsense business section books on it - titles like _Who Moved My Cheese?_ and _The Hard Thing About Hard Things._ Kinda cold in Richie's opinion, a little passive-aggressive, but maybe that's why all the cards from Eddie's coworkers are in the CRAP box. "Motherfucker put our names on all of them so we couldn't sell them on eBay."

"Oh, were you strapped for cash?" Richie asks dryly. He feels itchy here, in this twentieth floor glass-walled fuckwad of an office. They'd walked past the break room to get here, and Richie had seen no less than three different coffee machines, one of which had a steam wand. The fact that Eddie looks just as uncomfortable with Richie's presence here isn't helping.

"In 2010? Yes," Eddie says, surprisingly. "Myra and I had just bought the new apartment, and then the housing market crashed. It took us two years to sell our old condo; we almost went bankrupt."

"Oh." Richie taps his fingers against the side of the credenza. It takes up half the room - what the fuck did Eddie even use it for? It looks more like something a grandma would use to display her fine china. "I was in rehab in 2010."

Eddie blinks, and finally swivels in his chair to look at him. "Really?"

"Really." Richie doesn't know why the fuck he just said that. "I had a tiny problem with pain pills."

"Jesus," Eddie says, blowing out an anxious breath. "Why the fuck didn't you tell me that?! I would've flushed all the Vicoprofen at Ben and Bev's before you got here."

"I'm not gonna steal Ben's fucking back pain medicine Eds, Christ," Richie says, rolling his eyes. "Ignore me. I don't know why I just told you that anyway. I didn't even finish the treatment program."

"You didn't _finish?_ "

No, Richie had not finished. He wasn't even addicted to pain medication anyway; he'd been dating a TV actor who was playing the fun dad on a wholesome Disney Channel sitcom at the time, and one night they went to a nightclub in Hollywood and Richie got photographed giving him a handjob on a couch behind the bass speaker. Their faces were blurry, the club was dark, it was fine, but Richie got dumped by his closeted, skittish boyfriend and Nan and Steve got together and decided that Richie needed to lean in to the whole hard partier thing, for the sake of his reputation around town, which apparently needed to stay big and strong and manly. So Richie went to a lot of parties and did a lot of coke and then checked himself into a rehab program in Oregon after he crashed his car on the 405 and figured out that he really liked the codeine they gave him for his broken ankle, maybe a little too much. Like a preemptive strike, or something.

He had to leave after only three weeks because Steve booked him a part in a Bruce Willis action-comedy feature, and then made cracks for years about how he'd left rehab to film a movie about drug traffickers, because he's actually a gigantic dickwad and Richie can't actually believe sometimes that he didn't fire him sooner.

"Are you done yet?" Richie says instead. As a reflexive reaction to his whiny voice, Eddie scowls. "I wanna see your lunch spot. Let's get a heart healthy salad somewhere, Eds."

"I made reservations," Eddie says, shoving his file into the side of his PERSONAL EFFECTS box. He still has three days here at the office, he'd said, and Richie is intensely grateful they don't have to carry that monstrous, bulging thing out of the building along with Richie's carry-on rolling suitcase, which was awkward enough on its own in the elevator.

"For lunch?"

"Yes, you bridge troll, people need reservations for lunch too," Eddie says. The air between them is still weird, snapped tight with awkwardness that's making Richie's toes curl in his shoes. The strangeness of being at Eddie's office doesn't seem enough reason to make it _this_ awkward, but Richie can't think of any other reason - other than the obvious sidenote that Richie is in love with him, which Eddie doesn't and will never know about, so there. Richie's gotten pretty good, over the last couple of months, at aggressively repressing that bitch of an emotion for the rare moments when Eddie is in a situation to see his actual face. "Do you like ceviche?"

Normally Richie would pretend not to know what that is, but he's tired and weirded out and all he wants is Eddie to look him in the eye, so he says, "yes. Sandy used to make it with octopus. I liked it."

Eddie blinks at him mutely for a few seconds, looking mildly freaked out. "You ate octopus?"

"Not anymore, but I mean," Richie shrugs. "Let me guess. They give you cancer."

"No. It's actually better for you than shrimp," Eddie says. "Lower in calories, lots of vitamins. I just was thinking about when we were little, you used to freak out whenever we had to eat fish because of that time your mom made a trout and kept the head on when she served it."

"It still had _eyes!_ " Richie says. "It was _looking_ at us as we carved it up, Eddie!"

"Every piece of meat you've ever eaten has had eyes at some point, Richie," Eddie says, as unsympathetic as he'd been at age fourteen.

"Not _every_ piece of meat," Richie says with a grin, unable to help himself. At that, Eddie finally flinches, looking away quickly with his face tinged red around the edges. "Unless - oh fuck, is that what you call it when a guy isn't cut? Because I've only slept with other slutty Jewish men. Not on purpose, it wasn't a lifestyle choice, it's just there are so many of them that hang out at the bars in West Hollywood, it was just statistics really."

"Please stop talking about dicks," Eddie says, pained. "Come on. We have an hour to eat and then I have to be back here for my call. If you're good I'll buy you some crayons to play with while I work."

"Be still my heart," Richie says, genuinely meaning it.

So for the next thirty tense minutes, Richie and Eddie eat some tapas-style seafood at a pretentious cafe on the same block as Eddie's office, during which Richie makes a genuine attempt at coaxing him out of whatever weird mood is making him sit so rigidly in his chair. This works a little, but not completely - Richie gets the impression that there's something going on inside his head rather than outside of it, which might account for the unbearable, unexplained weirdness of this visit thus far.

"I'm sorry," Eddie finally says, after the waiter has whisked away their baker's dozen of half-eaten tiny plates. Richie had lied; he really wasn't all _that_ hungry. "I'm being weird."

"You seem a little, uh, stressed," Richie says delicately.

"A lot going on," Eddie mumbles, fussing with his water glass.

"It is Myra? I thought she was finally cooperating - "

"She is. No," Eddie interrupts tersely. "No offense Richie, but I don't really...want to talk about Myra with you."

"Oh," Richie says, blinking at him. Eddie's avoiding his gaze again - not that he'd been generous with the eye contact before - and Richie feels something very close to hurt worming its way into his voice. "If you say so."

"It's not _you,_ " Eddie says, his eyebrows pulling together in some weird, anxious form of distress. "I just - I don't want to talk about it on this trip. Is that alright? Like it's a thing I'm going through, it's fine - I just don't want to think about it while you're here."

"If that's what you want," Richie says reluctantly, and the air between them thickens with awkwardness again. He's going to try not to read into that, he decides. That Eddie had felt perfectly okay venting about it over the phone before, but speaking to Richie _in person_ is too much - whatever, that doesn't mean anything. His face and his voice and his big gay body being suddenly right there in Eddie's real life, a physical human presence that apparently has knocked their friendship into a weird, tense spiral is not something he needs to like, _read into,_ no sir.

"I'm sorry," Eddie says again, tilting his water glass back and catching some ice in his mouth. He crunches on it while he continues not looking at Richie. "This isn't how I wanted this to go."

"Hey," Richie says, viciously swallowing back his first instinct, which is to make a dick joke and then leave the table, "it's fine, it's cool. Really, Eds. Do you wanna start over? I can pretend I just sat down, and you ate all that vegetarian ceviche by yourself."

"It really wasn't as filling as the real stuff," Eddie says reluctantly. "And what the fuck was up with that cheese dish? Just blobs of cheese in oil? Are you fucking kidding me?"

"I liked that one," Richie says, grinning.

"Of course you did." Eddie shrugs irritably, like a little angry dance with his shoulders, which makes Richie wish he could make a gif out of a real life moment, so he could watch him do that over and over again in perpetuity. "Look...I have this stupid call, but then I can probably beg off early. Are you sure you want to wait for me at the office? There's a bookstore down the street that's pretty nice."

"Yeah, I could hang out there," Richie says, aggressively not thinking about how he's only been here two hours and already Eddie's asking for space. "Can I have some money for crayons?"

Eddie bites the inside of his cheek like he always does when he's trying not to smile, and then immediately winces, since it's still healing from his stab wound. "Oh you know what? I'm actually out of cash right now. Sorry. Forgot."

"Goddamn it," Richie says, smacking his palm against the table. Eddie jumps a little and then snorts. "Well, I guess that's okay. I'll just take one of your cards, then. No, really it's fine - I know how to forge your signature, Edthaniel, don't worry."

"Fuck you," Eddie says, but he's definitely smiling. Richie is gonna go ahead and take that as a good sign.

Richie does not, in reality, go to the bookstore, of course. Instead he walks for another two blocks until he finds a suitably dingy-looking Pret a Manger with an empty corner table and calls Bev, who is obviously deeply disappointed in both of them.

"It's all he's been talking about for weeks Richie, of course he wants you here," Bev tells him. "Ben and I were actually a little annoyed by it to tell you the truth, but it was cute so we didn't say anything."

"Okay, uh huh," Richie says, avoiding eye contact with a group of teenagers who are very unsubtly taking photos of him on their cell phones. "If I were not in public currently being recorded live for a twelfth grader's Instagram story, I would reply with something much more vulgar, Bevvie."

"Ah, Rich," Bev says sympathetically. "Try not to get in your head about it. You know how he gets! He probably worked himself into a nervous spiral and then didn't know how to pull himself out of it. Give him some room, then go back and act like nothing happened. Make him laugh, Richie. You're the only one who can make him really lose it sometimes. Do you remember that day we snuck into the ice cream parlor after we got kicked out for being too loud, and you put on that weird looking hat we found in Bill's basement and pretended you were from out of town? Eddie almost had an asthma attack, he was laughing so hard."

"Oh hey," Richie says, remembering that all at once. "It worked, too. First time I ever used my Boston accent and I pulled that shit off. I went in and out like three times because I couldn't carry everyone's cones all at once, and the girl behind the counter never caught on."

"Pretty sure she was humoring us, but whatever," Bev says, laughing. "Have a coffee. Sign some autographs for the Instagram kids. Then go back and cheer him up. Okay? It'll be fine."

"It'll be fine," Richie repeats, trying to imbue it with seriousness, to get the energy out into the world, or whatever. Bev hums an agreement. "Thanks for the pep talk, babe. If Eddie calls for the same reason do me a favor and tell that ice cream story again, because it makes me look good."

"No problem," Bev swears. "Hey, before you go, do you want something to cheer you up? It's pretty funny and it'll embarrass Ben."

"Absolutely I do," Richie says.

"Download this app on your phone called Detour," Bev says, "and then listen to the one for Grand Central Station. Trust me."

"Oh, this is gonna be good," Richie says, and this is how he discovers Ben's adorably uncool side hustle narrating audio architecture-themed walking tours for his college roommate's trendy start up app.

 _this is amazing. Thank you for saving my life. I will truly never forget this,_ Richie sends to Bev, and then proceeds to text the entire group chat a link to the app with an _EMERGENCY EMERGENCY BEN'S A FUCKING NERD_ message attached.

 _youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu're welcome!_ Bev texts him privately, and then adds a gif of Austin powers saying "nerd alert!" in the group chat.

The subsequent roasting keeps Richie occupied for more than enough time for Eddie to finish his call, which had been the point of Bev sending it to him, Richie suspects. Even Ben hadn't seemed all that surprised to suddenly find his secret hobby being put on blast (although Richie has a feeling he's not gonna be all that happy about the tweets Richie made. Good thing Ben doesn't have Twitter, it'll take a few days to get back to him).

"You're such an asshole," Eddie tells him, meeting him on the sidewalk of his office building, Richie's carry-on being dragged behind him with one hand. Eddie's put his briefcase on top of it, the strap buckled to the handle, which Richie is pathetically pleased about. "That was something Ben shared with us in confidence, you know."

"You _knew?_ "

"The confidence was from you specifically," Eddie tells him. "So you wouldn't do exactly what you just did, and tweet about it."

"Eddie, I have ninety thousand Twitter followers, I probably just made that app's fiscal year," Richie says, following Eddie down the sidewalk. "Wait - do you follow me on Twitter?"

"Ninety thousand people follow you?" Eddie asks incredulously, conspicuously ignoring Richie's question. "That's ridiculous. You never even tweet anything."

"Nan took my password away like a year ago, and she deleted a bunch of the old tweets too. I only just got it back."

Eddie snorts.

"I used to be very funny on there," Richie informs him archly. "I was an international trending topic like, twice."

"I'm really happy for you, kiddo," Eddie deadpans, and Richie chokes on a surprised laugh. "Is there money in that? _Trending?_ "

"If you know how to work it, Eddie baby," Richie says, and Eddie does the thing again where he tries not to smile and then accidentally irritates his healing wound. Richie tries not to look too smug about it, for both their sakes.

Whatever weird awkwardness had been there before seems to have eased off a little, so maybe it was just Richie being at Eddie's office that had freaked them both out, which - fair. Richie can totally understand why your famous comedian friend might feel a little out of place at a classy insurance firm that has been politely edging you out after you had a visible life crisis and a mysterious life threatening injury that you couldn't explain. Richie figures he's entitled to acting a little weird and standoffish, considering everything.

Bev and Eddie both have been staying at Ben's intensely cliche fuck-off expensive brownstone in Bushwick, which Richie is informed at length is actually an in-progress renovation project. Richie specifies 'at length' specifically because the second they get into the car, Eddie starts talking and then doesn't fucking stop.

"It doesn't actually belong to him, his clients hired him to remodel it and they're letting him live there until it's done since they're in Europe, they're like, fuck, French movie stars or something," Eddie tells him, talking high and fast as he aggressively drives through the streets of Manhattan like he's being chased. "Bev and I have been helping. He actually offered to pay us actually, since we've been doing so much, but we turned him down. Have you seen that movie, _Call Me By Your Name?_ I think it just came out. It's got that one guy in it, the guy from _The Social Network_ , I forget his name."

"Uh, don't think I've heard of it," Richie says, sitting half turned around in the passenger seat and watching Eddie talk, entranced. He's not even sure Eddie is breathing.

"One of them is in it. Ben's client. She bought the house for her mother, I guess. Or maybe her sister, I don't remember now," Eddie says. "She sent us a, what do you call it, a screener? Of the movie. It's like a copy they send to reviewers and stuff." Eddie shrugs. "Bev really liked it, but I thought it was sort of pretentious. Are you hungry?"

Richie blinks at him. "Um."

"Ben and Bev want to have an early dinner with us before we leave," Eddie says, tucking his chin down against his chest almost defensively, and taking a right turn so sharp that Richie's head is thrown back against the window.

"Sure. Hey Eds," Richie says, faux-casual, "you okay? Because you seem like you maybe took a bunch of speed right before you left your office."

"It was a shitty conference call," Eddie bites out. "Also, who does speed anymore?"

"Several people I know," Richie says, and Eddie shoots him an incredulous look.

"Well, now that you bring it up, remember an hour ago when you told me you were in rehab?" Eddie says. He keeps looking over at Richie and then looking back at the road quickly, his hands tightly wrapped around the steering wheel. "Could we go back to that for a second? Because I have some follow up questions."

"Eddie," Richie says, weirdly delighted by the realization that Eddie is actually _nervous,_ that maybe that awkwardness from before was because Eddie was _anxious about seeing him,_ unless Richie is wrong about that and Eddie really is just a manic weirdo - but odds are good that it's probably a combination of both. Richie will take it. "I don't want to talk about rehab. It's not a big deal. Do you want to check my arms for track marks? Will it make you feel better?"

"No," Eddie says sullenly. "I just - why'd you tell me like that? Just out of nowhere, like it doesn't matter?"

"Because I felt like it? And it doesn't?" Richie shrugs, subtly gripping the door handle as Eddie takes another hairpin turn. He's been driven around by Hollywood stunt drivers, in literal action car chase scenes, with more caution. "Sorry if it freaked you out. Are you freaked out?"

"No," Eddie lies badly. "I guess I just - I don't understand why you would - mother _fucker!_ " He leans on his horn, and then angrily flips off a driver in a red SUV. Richie lays a hand over his heart, feeling like he might actually _swoon._ "Son of a bitch. Nobody knows how to drive in this fucking city."

"Eds, are you taking steps to manage your daily stress levels?" Richie asks. "Like - yoga, or meditation or something? No reason why I'm asking that right now, at this moment. I'm just wondering."

"You've caught me on a bad day!" Eddie says, abruptly turning into the parking lot of a gas station, Richie watches him with equal parts wariness and fondness, forever torn between the two when it comes to Eddie, as usual. "Not that I'm implying you're the reason. I'm doing it again, fuck."

"You're not doing anything," Richie says, watching sympathetically as Eddie parks the car and then covers his face with both hands. There's a long beat of silence in which Richie tells himself sternly not to reach out for a hug, while Eddie breathes into his hands and mutters under his breath. "Eddie. Come on. It's just me."

"I'm sorry," Eddie says, muffled through his hands. "I really wanted this to go better. I wanted to be in a good mood." He lifts his face up and looks positively stricken, in the split second before he rearranges his face. Richie feels a sharp pain deep in his chest, like his heart is tearing.

"It doesn't matter. Eds, hey," Richie finally musters the balls to reach out, extending his hand across the endless canyon of the gear shift to touch Eddie's arm. Eddie jolts in surprise, and then relaxes, and then tenses up again, his muscles bunching up together beneath Richie's hand. Richie feels like the girl from Tam Lin, holding onto him regardless. "Look, whatever it is you're worried about, you don't have to be. You really don't. I just wanted to see you, that's all. You don't have to freak out about making it perfect or whatever - we could go alligator diving in the sewers for all I care, and I'd still have fun because I'd be with you."

"We are _never_ stepping foot in a sewer _ever_ again," Eddie vows, but he's cracked a smile, at least. "I bullied you into coming."

"What? No you didn't," Richie replies, not even thinking about it, but Eddie's shaking his head, frowning out the windshield at the doors to the gas station, like it holds the secrets of the universe.

"I know you didn't really have to come to New York for the interview, Rich. I'm not actually a moron," he says. "I just - I thought it would be a good excuse. Like a way for us to both have an out, if we wanted one." He swallows and Richie can see his adam's apple bobbing in his throat, a sight that makes his own throat go dry in response. "But I didn't think I would...lose it like this, fuck. Why am I so _anxious?_ " He hits the wheel lightly with one fist, glaring at the little air freshener that's dangling from his rearview mirror.

"Why would I want an out from you?" Richie wonders out loud, realizing only belatedly that it might be a little too revealing of a thing to say. Eddie's expression breaks open with tenderness, though, his eyes going soft and heartfelt, his smile wobbling a little at the edges. Richie clears his throat and looks down at his hands, before he does something really stupid. "I - well, I would've come anyway, Eddie. Maybe not with that _specific_ excuse, but I would've come up with a reason."

"Do you ever wonder why we still feel like we need a reason to see each other?" Eddie asks. "I mean - all of us. Bev and Ben keep pretending like she's doing him a favor, as if spending time together isn't a good enough reason. Every time Stan calls me, he has some half-assed excuse why he needs to talk. It's like we all feel like we're doing something wrong."

Richie has some thoughts that are still way too honest for public consumption. Or Eddie's. "You know," he says instead, "I think we all got a little too good at being unhappy, Eds. Maybe somewhere along the way, it started to feel like it was the only way we were supposed to be."

"Fuck that," Eddie says fiercely.

"Word." Richie reaches out again and tentatively takes Eddie's hand in his grip, holding it loosely between his fingers. He has a manic thought that if he squeezes too hard, Eddie might disintegrate right before his eyes. Just crumble into dust, beneath the weight of what Richie wants from him. "At least Stan calls. At least Ben and Bev _are_ together. Does it really matter what we say? Like, the shit we have to tell ourselves while we ease into it?"

"I guess not." Eddie is sitting very still, too. The air feels almost fragile. "I don't want it to be like that with you and me, though. Maybe that's why I've been so weird today - I didn't feel right about using an excuse to see you."

"You can see me anytime you want, Eddie," Richie says, his heart in his throat. He's never meant any words more. "I'm rich now. I can fly across the country whenever the fuck I want."

Eddie shakes his head at him fondly and pulls him closer by his grip on Richie's hand, reaching out with his free one to fix the collar of Richie's shirt, which has turned inside out at some point. Richie holds his breath the entire time, his heart pounding so hard he can feel it in his fucking ears. "Let's start over for real this time. Yeah? Ben's cooking, but we could stop and pick something up. Dessert, or something."

"I have a bottle of eighty dollar bourbon in my suitcase, that's my contribution," Richie tells him.

Eddie wrinkles his nose. "You drink bourbon?"

"No, but it seems like something Ben drinks," Richie says. He'd wandered around the liquor store for almost an hour, at a complete and utter loss, until one of the employees took pity on him and asked if they could help. Richie had spent ten minutes explaining Ben and Bev's respective life stories before the guy cut Richie off with a wave of his hand and asked how much he wanted to spend. _An impressive amount,_ Richie had said. He's almost certain that the employee had walked away thinking that Richie was trying to seduce his married friends into a threesome. "We should buy a pie."

"And some liquor the rest of us can drink," Eddie adds. He pulls his hand away, and Richie immediately misses its warmth. "I know a place."

The brownstone is half-painted, half-decorated, and half-occupied: Ben, Bev, and Eddie have been containing themselves to the first floor. There's rich, and then there's _three story brownstone in Brooklyn rich;_ despite the royalty checks Richie receives each month from eight different sitcom guest spots, a handful of movies, and a two-season run as a devil's advocate anti-feminist lawyer on Ally McBeal, Richie could never afford a place like this. Maybe if he got cast in a Marvel movie, or something.

"Fancy," Richie says with a whistle, tackle-hugging Ben right there in the doorway. Bev laughs at them from the living room, helping Eddie with Richie's suitcases, carefully navigating them around the open cans of paint scattered around the floor. "Benji, my man. Your excellent and informative walking tours have made it so that I've barely missed you at all. It's like you were with me the whole time."

"You're welcome," Ben says, only a tinge of red around his cheeks. "I knew one of them would tell you. I'm not surprised it was Eddie."

"Hey," Eddie squawks, "I did _not_ \- "

"Oh, a pie!" Bev says quickly, voice overly loud. She gives Richie a wild-eyed look of amusement over Eddie's shoulder. "Ben, look - they got pie from Peetee's!"

Ben gives her the stink eye. "Bev, did you - "

"Ben, look, we also brought you bourbon," Richie says quickly. He fumbles in his duffel for the bottle. "It cost eighty dollars, Ben! Ben, look - "

"Sad," Eddie pronounces. Bev makes a comical face of shock. "Both of you. Sad."

"Eddie had a very difficult conference call this afternoon," Richie announces, clasping Ben's shoulder and squeezing. Ben shakes him off grouchily, and then laughs when Richie puts his hand right back in the same spot and strokes him like a dog. "Some tough insurance claimage at the office today. Synergy was all off. Assets and liabilities were all ah, askew - "

Ben claps his hand over Richie's mouth. "Richie," he says, "welcome to our home. House rule number one is that you can't make fun of Eddie's job."

"Ben, I would rather die," Richie says, muffled against Ben's palm.

"It's true, Rich, Ben and I learned that lesson the hard way. Why do you think we have to paint the living room for the second time?" Bev asks. For the first time, Richie notices a streak of black across the wall to the kitchen, covered up with a thin first coat of light blue. "Eddie got a little agitated while we were doing the trim."

Richie knocks Ben's hand away. " _Eddie,_ " he says, in utter delight.

"I said I was sorry," Eddie says sullenly, arms crossed.

"I know sweetie, but I'm just saying," Bev says. She tugs Richie away from Ben by one arm. "Come on. Ben's making pancakes."

"For dinner?" Richie asks.

"Why not?" Bev retorts, and well, fair enough.

It feels almost mean to say out loud, but Ben's gained weight; not in an unhealthy way, but Richie gets the sense that he's a little self-conscious about it by the way he keeps tugging on his sweater. Not that it makes him any less blindingly attractive - if anything he looks even more beautiful with some meat on his bones - no pun intended - and he's lost that panicky, dehydrated look that he'd had in Derry. He keeps looking at Bev with a dazed look on his face, which makes him look even prettier, especially with the incredulously happy way Bev looks back at him. The two of them together are like watching a sunrise up close.

Richie eats four pancakes and is quickly offered more, at which point he realizes that stress eating is probably not the best tactic to take and opts for a refill of bourbon instead. Not much healthier all in all, but it does pair oddly well with maple syrup. Richie pats himself on the back for that lucky prediction.

"This one's my favorite," Bev says, elbow-to-elbow with Eddie as they lean over Ben's iPad, scrolling through Google. "'Richie Tozier Gets Down and Dirty with Dana Delaney in Dunedin.' Fuck, that's a tongue twister. Is Dunedin New Zealand or Australia? I always get them mixed up."

"New Zealand," Richie says cheerfully. "She was shooting a movie."

"Should've written 'Daydreaming in Dunedin with Dana Delaney,'" Ben says, ever the poet. "It would've flowed better."

"Ben, you fucking romantic," Richie replies.

"Did you really date her?" Eddie asks skeptically. "I think I saw one of her movies once. She's not that good."

"Not really," Richie says. "Our management set us up. We went for dinner once or twice. She was sweet. Kinda boring though, not really my type." He shrugs. "It was kind of nice to have somebody to go to the parties with though, so it looked like it was much more serious than it was, probably."

Eddie makes a face and looks back down at the tablet, swiping somewhat decisively.

"Does that happen a lot?" Ben asks. "Going out with people for publicity?"

"Well, I did it plenty back when I had designs on the A-list, Banjo," Richie says. "Nan backed off after I started dating Sandy, though. Plus I'd stopped auditioning for movie roles by then, I wanted to focus on my standup." He snorts, the derisive sound escaping despite his private promise to Bill not to make fun of himself too much anymore.

"Oh! I found a gay one," Bev says, and makes a hash mark on the pad of paper they've been using to keep track. So far the 'Richie Tozier is totally gay' coverage is outpacing the 'Richie Tozier is straight and likes to fuck hot women' coverage by a mile. "'12 Times Richie Tozier Was Gay AF and Nobody Noticed.' Kinda presumptuous, Buzzfeed!"

"I'm trendy with the kids, Bev," Richie says. "Still, that's positive. That counts as positive publicity. Don't you think?"

Bev turns the iPad around to show Richie a gif of himself waving and giggling from an episode of Malcolm in the Middle he did in 2002. He'd played an effeminate store clerk whose entire purpose in the plotline was to make Bryan Cranston sexually uncomfortable. Underneath the gif is a string of eye emojis. "Yeah, this seems a little bitchy to me, Rich."

"Fuck these people," Eddie grumbles, pulling the tablet away. "Like any of them even know how to write, anyway. What, they couldn't hack it in real journalism, so now they make eighty grand a year writing gossip blog posts? Ridiculous."

"Tell us how you really feel, Eds," Richie says, a little warmed by his defense despite himself.

"Do entertainment journalists really make eighty grand a year?" Ben asks skeptically.

"Some of them make more," Richie says, breaking the news to him gently. Ben makes an appalled face.

"Oh, I found another - oh," Eddie says, his face growing dark. "Never mind."

Richie laughs. "Subtle, Eds," he says, reaching across their dirty plates for the tablet. "Lemme see."

"No, Rich, it's really not - "

"I get the worst ones in an email blast every Monday from Nan, come on," Richie says, wrenching the iPad away. On the screen is a paparazzi shot of Sandy and Richie from three years ago, one of the days they'd been photographed mid-breakup while Richie was helping her move out of his house. Richie remembers this vividly; they'd been upset and angry at each other, fighting all morning, only calling a temporary truce when the moving truck arrived and both of them had to suck it up and help carry the boxes out to the lawn. There were photographers popping up almost all day - Richie's neighbor at the time was a model who was dating one of the Kardashians, they hung around the block all the time - but the only pictures that had actually shown up in the press were the embarrassing ones, of course. The shots of them talking angrily by the mailbox, one where Richie is gesturing ostentatiously while Sandy glares up at him, holding her cell phone so that it obscures her face. And the most famous one, that had haunted Richie's internet presence for years - a photo of Sandy crying into her hands as she sits on the edge of the sidewalk, Richie crouched next to her, one hand on her knee. He'd been crying too - not that the camera had caught that part.

"That's Sandy, huh?" Ben asks gently, leaning over Richie's shoulder. "She's pretty."

"Wasn't really my type either," Richie says dryly, swiping the article away. "That should count towards the gay column, Bev. If we're being honest."

Bev purses her lips. "I know you're not saying she turned you off of women forever, Rich."

"No, I turned her off of men," Richie says lightly, but considering Sandy really did go on to marry a woman after she dumped his sorry ass, he's not sure that even counts as a joke. "Here," he says, gesturing for the tablet. "I'll show you the pièce de résistance."

"I'm already scared," Bev jokes, dunking a stray piece of pancake off of Ben's plate into the community gravy boat of syrup. "But also intrigued."

Richie pulls it up easily; he's had the exact Google search needed to pull this article up quickly memorized for at least five years. "Just want to state for the record that at the time that I pitched this skit, I still thought I was straight. Not sure if that makes this more or less pathetic, but for the sake of my journalistic integrity, I wanted everyone to know."

It's a sketch from Richie's single season of MADtv, in which a twenty-one year old Richie plays Stephanie Weir's flamboyantly gay brother, who is also inexplicably dressed like a cowboy. The joke was that his character was the only one at the family reunion who believed he was straight. Some real Freudian shit. Richie vividly remembers fighting with the producers so he could wear the chaps. When _MADtv_ thinks your joke is a little over the top, that may be a sign that you need to do some self-evaluating - not that Richie had taken the hint at the time.

"Richie," Bev says seriously, as the sketch crawls to its end point. Eddie has one hand over his eyes, shaking his head, and Ben is laughing into his bourbon glass. "You know, it's weird, because that was very funny, but I also feel like crying."

"Title of my sex tape!" Richie crows.

Ben yanks over the notepad and writes, _GAY AND SAD_ across the whole thing in his blocky, architect's writing. "Is there more of your MADtv stuff on YouTube? Bev, do another search." Bev cackles a little as she types, wiggling in her chair. "I can't believe you were a _cast member._ I used to watch MADtv all the time! I guess I wouldn't have recognized you at the time, but still."

"I was recurring actually, and only for one season," Richie says. He waggles his eyebrows at Eddie, who is looking distinctly unamused, side-eyeing Ben and Bev from his chair. "That's how Eddie knew my stuff. He used to watch it."

"I remembered him, so what," Eddie says, rolling his eyes. "I saw him on Comedy Central Presents a couple years later and recognized him from the show, whatever."

"He _followed_ my _work,_ " Richie says proudly.

"Aw," Bev says. Eddie scowls at her.

"Involuntarily," Eddie says. He glances over at Rich with a sly look, which makes Richie brace for impact, on instinct. "Actually, I didn't even like your stuff that much. But," he smirks, "Myra did."

Ben and Bev both explode with noise, yelling _OHHHHH_ at the top of their lungs. Richie mimes a heart attack, leaning hard against the empty chair to his right.

"Eddie," he says, wheezing, "Eddie, please take that back."

"She was a big fan," Eddie continues, relentless. "She bought your first stand up album. On _CD._ "

"Ouch!" Ben says, holding Bev up as she collapses, cackling, against his side. "Rich, that's gotta hurt."

"It's the worst fucking thing I've ever heard," Richie says seriously, addressing the universe at large. "My career no longer has any meaning. I should move to the wilderness and become a novelist."

"You're so horrified you want to turn into Bill?" Eddie asks skeptically.

"I could think of no grimmer fate," Richie says.

"Bill lives in the wilderness?" Bev asks, wrinkling her nose. "I thought he lived in Malibu."

"Pretty much the same thing," Richie says.

The drive from Ben's place to their AirBnb is apparently _two and a half hours long_ ("That's an optimistic estimate," Eddie says, "if traffic is anything like it was last night, we're looking at three minimum.") which Richie would've liked to have known before they left the brownstone, _thanks._ He makes Eddie stop three times at three different bodegas before they even get out of Brooklyn.

"So just really quickly, explain to me the difference between this bag of gummy worms, and this bag of gummy bears," Eddie says. Richie can tell he's trying really hard to be more irritated than he really is. "Is it just the shape? They're the same brand. They can't taste all that different."

"Eddie, this one is mixed fruit, and this one is tropical," Richie says patiently.

"You're a mixed fruit," Eddie says.

"Zing!" Richie laughs. "Do you want a sour patch? I got them especially just for you, Eddie my love. Because you're sour. Get it?"

"No. I want a Twizzler," Eddie demands. Richie obediently rips into the last unopened bag of candy, and Eddie promptly sticks it in his mouth and lets it hang over his chin like a limp cigarette. Richie is reminded vividly of ninth grade home ec class - sitting in the back of the classroom that always stank of eggs and baby powder, sharing a bag of Twizzlers with Eddie and Mike as they pretended to fill out worksheets on table settings. "Fuck - we should've made a mixtape. Remember the ones we used to trade back and forth?"

"Oh my God," Richie says in delight, " _yes._ That one you made me for when my parents took me camping in Carrabassett Valley was my favorite - remember that? - I must've listened to it a million times."

Eddie ducks his chin, looking pleased and a little embarrassed. "Yeah, I remember that trip. You called me from the ranger's med station to tell me about how you got poison oak."

"I called Bill too," Richie recalls. Honestly though - Bill hadn't picked up. It'd been Richie's perfunctory excuse call, a preemptive measure against anyone who might think it was weird that Richie spent the entirety of his mom's calling card to talk to Eddie for forty-five minutes when they'd only been apart for a day and a half - so he could say later, _well I called Bill too, so there!_ Lots of preemptive excuses, back then. Preteen Richie was full of them. That he's still pulling them out of his back pocket at age forty-one is sort of dismal. "Lucky for us, we now live in the age of Spotify. Where the fuck is your aux cord?"

"Aux cord? Please. This is a nice car," Eddie says, shooting him a withering look. "Turn on your Bluetooth, dummy."

"I'm unused to luxury, Eds," Richie says. Eddie rolls his eyes at him.

Richie had lost that mixtape when he left for college; it probably disappeared into one of the many _RICHIE'S STUFF_ boxes that his parents had shoved into the attic after he moved out, most of which were destroyed when the roof collapsed during a thunderstorm in 2002. Richie had gone back to help his mother try and salvage what she could out of the upper two floors of the house, but most of it was rain-soaked and destroyed. All Richie himself had gotten away with was the headboard from his childhood bed - God knows why they'd kept _that_ \- and a box of books that had survived the deluge from under the cover of an overturned bureau. Not having any memory of Derry at the time, Richie had shoved the entire box in his own attic, not to be unearthed again until about six months ago, when he suddenly remembered a copy of _A Home at the End of the World_ that Stan had given him for his sixteenth birthday. Richie tore through the box to find it, only to discover that the cover had been ripped off, and the inscription Stan wrote was too damaged by the water to read.

Stan hadn't remembered what he'd written, when Richie asked him. "Probably something pretentious, that I thought was deep," he'd said over the phone. "You remember what I was like at sixteen. I was a little arthouse hipster."

"I don't know that hipsters existed, technically, in 1992," Richie told him. "Pretentious though - sure. Arthouse - definitely. I should really be thanking you, you know - all those boring French movies you made me sit through actually made me seem kind of smart in college. Not that I remembered why I'd watched them."

"I was trying to bring some culture into your life," Stan joked. Conversations with him were still rare enough that Richie didn't fire anything back to egg him on, like he normally would have - the last thing he wanted to do was waste phone time on bickering. They could do that over text message just fine. "Here - I'll write you a new one. Something I would write today. It'll be better that way, anyway."

"Nothing embarrassing," Richie said. "Remember, I'm famous now. Anything you write down on paper automatically goes into my memoirs."

"As if you'd ever sit still long enough to write a memoir," Stan said witheringly, but as was the case with a lot of things Stan said to Richie nowadays, it had a palpable fondness underneath, a warmth that always made Richie feel like he was coming home to something.

A couple weeks later, another copy of the novel arrived in the mail - not a new one, just a battered paperback that Stan probably picked up at a used bookshop, which was more fitting for Stan, anyway. On the inside cover, he'd written: _I don't remember reading this book as a kid, but having read it as an adult I can see that it was maybe an insensitive gift to give you, back in '92. Sorry for that. Is it even any good? I don't know. You tell me. Love, Stan._ Richie still laughs whenever he thinks about it.

"Do you remember the play?" Richie asks Eddie, thinking about Stan and Eddie at seventeen, hunched over a wooden stage with paintbrushes. "You and me and Stan were on the crew. Was it tenth grade?"

" _Steel Magnolias,_ " Eddie says, munching on another Twizzler. "Rachel Henderson played Shelby. Bill was dating her, that's why we all joined."

"Right." Richie laughs a little, remembering Bill's fumbling attempts to look cool in front of Derry High's eclectic theatre crowd, which amounted to Rachel and three of her friends, all of whom wore their hair the exact same way every day - a side ponytail, and one earring on the opposite side. The 80s had taken twice as long to fade away in Derry. "I don't know what made me think of that. This song, probably." It was _Me and Bobby McGee,_ which had been the highlight of Eddie's camping mixtape. Back then, Richie had spent hours wondering if it, you know, _meant anything_ that Eddie had put the Janis Joplin version on the mix instead of the one by Kris Kristofferson that Mrs. Kaspbrak was always playing on her turntable.

"I always thought you should've auditioned," Eddie says. "Maybe not for that one. But they did _Arsenic and Old Lace_ that next fall; you would've been a perfect Mortimer."

"I was way too anxious," Richie says. "You know, I still get stage fright? I puke every time. Nan sent me to a hypnotist once."

"Did it work?"

"Well, I stopped smoking," Richie says, and Eddie laughs. "No, you know, it's - manageable. I've got a handle on it, especially now, after everything. That is, if I haven't totally torpedoed my career beyond all salvation."

"You haven't," Eddie says, rolling his eyes. "When's the interview?"

"Thursday."

"We've got a few days then," Eddie says. "Hey listen - I'm sorry if that was mean. At dinner - making fun of your press."

"It wasn't," Richie says, surprised. "Did I seem upset? I wasn't upset."

"No, I just - it occurred to me that it wasn't the most sensitive thing in the world," Eddie says dryly. "Those pictures of your ex - Sandy - "

"Oh come on, it's fine, you guys are fine, Eds."

"I was just gonna say, they looked intense, that's all," Eddie says. "I could tell Bev felt a little bad, too."

Richie stops scrolling on Springsteen's _Backstreets,_ a song that Richie is positive hadn't actually been on Eddie's mix, but Richie had listened to it so many times that summer that it feels like it belongs there anyway. "It was a long time ago."

"You told us in Derry you were with her for like five years," Eddie says, a note of curiosity in his voice.

"Yeah." Richie looks over at Eddie's profile, which seems angular in the dying light of the evening. He looks far more relaxed than he had earlier that day, clenching his fists as he apologized in the parking lot of a gas station. But maybe it's just the highway - Eddie always looks more at home when he's driving fast, on an interstate or a backcountry highway, nothing in front of him but the road. "Almost six. It was a bad scene, Eds. We weren't good to each other."

"She cheated on you, you said," Eddie says neutrally.

"Yeah, but." Richie shrugs helplessly, trying to come up with a way to explain his most significant romantic relationship to Eddie without having to ramble on about codependency and loneliness and how much you end up resenting someone who crawls their way out of depression before you, how hard you have to work at not hating them for being happy. "We weren't really together when that happened. We were still living together, but we were all but broken up already. So it wasn't as terrible as it sounds, really. Both of us had already checked out by that point."

Eddie is quiet for a moment, drumming his fingers against the wheel. "If you say so," he says. "I just - you know. Six years. That's...that's six _years_ , Rich. It's not nothing."

"That's how long you were with Myra," Richie realizes.

Eddie nods. "It's not _eleven_ years," he says, obliquely referencing Bev's marriage, "but it's not nothing, either."

"No," Richie says, "it's not nothing." He thinks about it for a second: Sandy, with her long dark hair and absurdly sexy thigh tattoos, her smoky radio voice and the crass sense of humor that was at times even more vulgar than Richie's. For the first three years they dated they lived on opposite sides of the country, which had been an ideal situation for both of them considering they were both closeted and miserable with virtually everything in their lives. But while Sandy had slowly crawled her way out of her dark hole, Richie hadn't - at least not in the time that he'd been with her - and what used to be convenient and comfortable and a little poetic quickly turned into a bitter resentment that poisoned everything they did together. She'd tried very hard to make it work - she was a good person, and she loved Richie as much as she was able - but of course Richie hadn't tried at all. He hadn't wanted to be loved, at the time. "It could've been good. She wasn't a bad person and she cared about me, we could've stayed friends. But I fucked that up, with how I handled everything." He scoffs. "I didn't treat her very well."

"You said the same thing about Josh," Eddie points out.

"Yeah, funny! Isn't it fucked up how the common denominator in all my failed relationships is my own presence in them," Richie says. "Weird how that works."

"Don't say that about yourself," Eddie chastises gently. "You have good ones, successful ones, too. Look at us - the Losers - together again, after all this time. Hell, look at _me_."

 _I'm always looking at you,_ Richie thinks. "I meant - "

"I know what you meant," Eddie interrupts, reaching out to take Richie's phone right out of his hand. "I didn't put this one on your mix. It was a different Springsteen song."

"I know," Richie says stupidly, staring down at his empty hand for a second, half shell-shocked by the brush of Eddie's body heat, the barely here-then-gone warmth of his bare palm. "I couldn't remember which one you put on there."

"It was _Tougher Than the Rest,_ " Eddie says, queuing it up. Richie swallows hard at the sound of the opening chords, hit by a visceral memory of sitting in the back of his dad's Datsun, listening to this song over his headphones and wondering, hoping, that Eddie was back home in his room listening to the same one at the same time. "This one's still my favorite."

"Yeah? Favorite Springsteen of _all_ time?" Richie asks. He has to clear his throat, his voice coming out gravelled and hoarse.

Eddie shrugs. "Top five at least," he says, with a muted grin.

They pull into their rented apartment at nearly midnight, and collapse wordlessly into bed - Richie doesn't even have the strength to tease him about how expensive and obviously nouveaux New York rich the place is. When Richie wakes up the next morning, it's to the sound of Eddie's alarm through the wood-panelled walls; he lays there for a long time, staring at the ceiling and thinking, _that's what he sounds like in the morning. That's what his footsteps sound like in the kitchen as he makes coffee. That's what he does when he first wakes up. That's what he does when nobody is watching._

"Sad!" Richie whispers at himself. "Pathetic!" Then he lays there for another ten minutes, listening. At least he's self-aware about it, he figures.

Eddie takes him to brunch at a classy seafood restaurant, where Richie orders a lobster omelet and asks the waitress to absolutely drown it in their special 'Hollandaise of the Day,' which on that particular morning is _brown butter bacon._ Eddie scowls at him and tells him that it's just butter and cream, basically, and isn't he worried about his arteries, and then proceeds to order fried crab cakes like that's any better.

"Did you know, Eds," Richie asks casually, leaning back in his chair with the biggest latte on offer, "that I have a personal trainer?"

"I do not believe that," Eddie says crisply. "That's a ridiculous lie."

"It's true. His name is Alex," Richie says proudly. "He's supposed to help me stay in shape in case I get another action movie."

"Oh, right," Eddie says, "so you're saying that's your plan to revitalize your career? 'Come out, do an interview with New York Magazine, then get cast in a Mark Wahlberg vehicle?'"

"You never know. Jack Black's in that Jumanji remake. And he did King Kong, too. It's _en vogue_ now."

"But in a cool way?" Eddie asks. "Not in the hacky way it was when you did those Bruce Willis movies?"

"It was _one_ Bruce Willis movie, the other one I did was with Jackie Chan."

"Sure," Eddie says, nodding exaggeratedly, "because that makes it less embarrassing."

Richie steals one of the bread rolls off of Eddie's appetizer plate. "All I'm saying is, Alex lets me eat whatever I want, as long as I keep up his workout routines."

"And when was the last time you _saw_ Alex?" Eddie asks skeptically. "I talk to Bill too, you know. I know for a fact you only left your house three times while he was staying there."

"I could have a treadmill, you don't know," Richie says. "I could be doing pull ups in my bedroom like Linda Hamilton in Terminator."

"I cannot believe you just compared yourself to Linda Hamilton," Eddie says incredulously.

"I met her once," Richie says, his mouth full of bread. Eddie grimaces dramatically. "She complimented my biceps specifically."

"I very much doubt that," Eddie says.

There doesn't seem to be a _wide_ variety of things to do in Montauk, other than walk on the beach or eat expensive food, but that suits Richie just fine. Eddie wears linen pants - _beige linen pants,_ Richie notes with delight - and a shirt that he leaves unbuttoned to his collarbone, which is enough titillation to keep Richie happy for months, at least. If not years. The walk down to one beach, which Eddie deems to be not as good as the one he went to last time he was here, so then they walk to that other one, at which point Eddie announces that this isn't the right beach either, and maybe they should've Googled this first.

"Oh, but we're working off all that hollandaise, Eds," Richie tells him, in his best WASP housewife voice. It successfully gets a laugh.

Richie doesn't want to picture Eddie coming here with Myra, even though he knows that they did, at least a few times during their marriage. He'd rather picture Eddie alone, or with some faceless corporate girlfriend that he could picture Eddie dating someday, once he gets past the divorce. He's already bracing for the inevitable, in some sad corner of his head: having to eat brunch with some blonde PR executive, maybe a little younger than Eddie but not inappropriately so, kind of sharp-tongued but not mean, confident in her looks but not classically beautiful. Sometimes he wonders if Josh was right all those years ago when he said that Richie was staying in the closet because he loved torturing himself.

"There's a lighthouse too," Eddie says, kind of fuzzily confused like he's been all day, trying to guide Richie around only by memory. It's actually kind of incredible that he hasn't even tried to Google Map anything all day. Richie is very proud of him. "I think you can go inside it? I don't remember. Myra wasn't interested, and I remember I tried to go on my own but it was closed for some reason."

"Maybe tomorrow," Richie suggests, pulling Eddie down into the cream-colored sand by his elbow. "Let's chill for awhile. It's almost sunset."

"I haven't actually watched a sunset in years," Eddie muses. Richie watches him kick off his shoes and dig his feet into the sand, and finds himself tearing up a little, humiliatingly. He hasn't complained once all day about the sand, or the weather, or even the water glasses at the restaurant, which had been less than sanitary to say the least. Wonders never cease, at least when it comes to the grit and determination of Eddie Kaspbrak. "Not unless you count the meditation video I put on when I can't sleep."

"Eddie, you watch meditation videos?" Richie asks. "Actually, that's very healthy of you probably. Good for you."

"I didn't say they _worked,_ " Eddie says, kicking Richie's knee with his foot. Leaning back on his elbows, Eddie tilts his head back, his eyes going half-mast, sighing with pleasure into the cool breeze off the water. Richie swallows a lump in his throat and has to force himself to look away. "I'll send you some."

"I use music," Richie says. "Also weed."

"To meditate?"

"To relax," Richie says, mirroring Eddie's pose in the sand. "You seem like you're in a better mood now than you were yesterday."

"I'm sorry about that again," Eddie says. "I got worked up about it. I dunno, I'm working on that."

"You were fine," Richie says, for probably the dozenth time. "It's weird. It's still weird with all of us. I've barely talked to Stan, since Derry."

"Yeah, same," Eddie says absently. He's clearly been letting his hair grow out too, and the whole effect - the beard and his curls and his bare feet in the sand - has Richie feeling tender and vulnerable, like his whole heart is just a fresh bruise. "Can I ask you a question? And if I ask it, will you give me a real answer this time?"

"Yes," Richie says cautiously.

"Why did you tell me about rehab like that?"

Richie feels that question deep in his gut, somewhere between his roiling stomach and his shaky knees. "I don't know. I guess I wanted to shock you a little."

"You usually do that with jokes, not with...that kind of thing," Eddie says. He sounds a little forlorn, and Richie winces.

"I'm sorry," Richie says, pulling his glasses up and rubbing lightly at his eyes. When the lenses fall back down, Eddie is looking at him, evenly and seriously, his arms crossed lightly over his knees. "That's just how I tell people things about myself, I think. Like it doesn't matter."

"Okay," Eddie says, nodding and - thankfully - turning away. Richie immediately wants to be looked at again, at the same time that he feels a cool spiral of relief that Eddie can no longer see his face. "Well, I don't want it to be like that, with us."

"I don't either," Richie says honestly. "Eddie." He grasps for something to say, something that would be meaningful but still believably platonic, sincere but not intense. He hasn't gotten any better at that balance in the twenty-seven years since he last had one of these conversations with Eddie.

Eddie waits for a second, giving Richie the chance to complete his thought, but when nothing comes he smiles ruefully. "Do you want me to check the internet again for you?"

Richie had left his phone back at the apartment, mostly because Josh had uploaded another video that morning, helpfully titled MY SECRET GAY RELATIONSHIP WITH RICHIE TOZIER, 1998-99, PART FIVE (FINALE!!!) Richie isn't honestly sure what else Josh could realistically have to even _say_ at this point, but either way he really doesn't want to know. "No, not yet. Just leave it for now."

"It'll all change after your interview," Eddie says confidently. "I do think Nan's right in that you should tweet something."

"My replies are already…" Richie shudders. "Yeah, no thanks."

"You don't have to read those," Eddie points out.

"True, true, but I think you're underestimating just how anxious of a person I am, Eddithan," Richie says. "Besides, what am I gonna say? I'm not fucking twenty-two anymore. I don't feel good about...I dunno. _Using_ it."

"Telling the truth about yourself isn't wrong," Eddie says carefully, slowly like he's being deliberate about each word. "Being honest about your life wouldn't be...taking advantage, or whatever it is that you're saying."

"I don't want to be honest," Richie says immediately. "I never wanted - fuck, I never wanted _any_ of this." He kicks some sand with the heel of his shoe, half-burying his other ankle. "I was going to come out, you know. I really was. I had a whole plan - you remember Bev and I talked about it, in the hospital when we were waiting on Stan - "

"I remember," Eddie interrupts gently.

"But not like this. Not like - " Richie shakes his head, thinking of the email from his hookup, how _kind_ it was, how genuinely concerned the guy had sounded, and Richie hadn't even saved his fucking name in his contacts. "It should've been my choice."

"Yes, it should've been," Eddie says firmly. "All of it should've been your choice. What gets said about you, and how. The relationships you had, the life you lived - it all should've been up to you. But it wasn't, and that's - that breaks my fucking heart, Rich. You have no idea."

Richie stares fiercely out at the ocean, not daring to look over.

"I've been thinking - um," Eddie says, stammering a little and sitting up straight, a blur of motion in Richie's peripheral. "I've been thinking about those pictures, of you and Sandy - and what you said at dinner that night in Derry, about how you got a vasectomy for her - "

"I would've done that anyway," Richie interjects. He rubs at the skin below his eye, still not brave enough to turn his head to look. "She didn't, I don't know, talk me into it or anything - I know I kind of said she did, but I always fucking do that, I talk shit about Sandy for a cheap laugh, and it sucks. I fucking suck for doing that."

"Maybe a little," Eddie says, "but that's not what I'm trying to talk about here, Rich, Jesus." Richie finally turns his head, startled into courage, and finds Eddie looking back at him, his eyes wide and sincere. "Richie, could you just - could you tell me if she loved you? I'd really like to know. I mean Josh clearly didn't - the fucking asshole - and you haven't mentioned anyone else, and I just - I just need to know that somebody loved you. Okay? Even if it didn't last, or it wasn't totally healthy or whatever - but God, you were with her for six years! So she loved you. Right?"

Richie finds himself frozen, unable to even blink. Then in the next second, the world catches up - the waves crash against the shore - and Eddie is still blinking at him, his face imploringly earnest. Like a knife straight to the ribs. "I - yes, she loved me. We loved each other," Richie stammers, probably inadequately. "We were together and even though it wasn't - you know. We were _together_. She did all those things that you do, you know - she helped me pick out clothes, she came to my shows and we had a dog, and...we watched TV together and cooked together. It was - it was a kind of love, yeah. It was mostly like being _in_ love - I mean, it was close enough, you know? And we could've been happy with that, maybe. If I wasn't such a shithead."

"Don't _say_ shit like that," Eddie says fiercely. Richie notes distantly that there are tears in his eyes, too. "Richie, I mean it. Don't say that."

"Okay," Richie says, incredulous and sort of hysterical, in the way you are when you really and truly don't know what's about to happen to you. "Okay. I won't. Sorry."

Eddie bites his lip, leaning his chin against his hand, like he's trying to push his emotions back inside his body with his fist. "Myra and I didn't do any of that," he says. "You know - I was so lonely. She was around me _all the time_ and I still was always _lonely._ I don't think I would've been able to do it for much longer, even if I hadn't remembered. I would've...I don't know. I would've done something."

"You would've left her," Richie prompts, his heart in his throat. "Right? That's what you would've done, Eddie. You didn't need your memories to do that."

"I did, but okay," Eddie says, shaking his head quickly, an irritated movement. "I think - I think the worst part of all of this for me is that it still feels like it's my job. That it should've been me doing all that shit for you." He's jittery, visibly trembling, jerking his hands around like he can't bear to keep them still. "All of that stuff - I would've done it, Richie. I would've picked out your clothes, and ironed your fucking jeans, and I would've come to every single show, Rich. Every single one. Even when you sucked, even when you - when you were making terrible jokes about made up girlfriends - I still would've gone and I would've sat in the front row, because that's just what I'm _supposed to do._ That's _my job._ "

"Eddie," Richie says helplessly. He feels like he's standing very still on top of a very quickly-moving carousel, and if he makes the slightest movement the whole universe will go careening wildly off-balance.

"Just let me finish," Eddie says quickly, rubbing his palm over his face. His eyes are red, Richie notices for the first time. "I'm not saying that I resent - you know, I'm _glad_ that you weren't alone, that you had - you know, people. A person who cared about you. I wish it hadn't - I wish it would've worked out for you. In a weird way, I mean. And maybe not Sandy - with anybody - with whoever! I just wish you could've been _happy_ , that you could've found the real thing." His voice breaks, and Richie reaches out involuntarily, grabbing his wrist in his clammy hand. It's not even a conscious decision that he makes, it's just a fact of reality somehow, that Richie is now touching him. "But I'm also glad you didn't. Because that means it's still _my_ job, and Richie, I - "

Richie can't stand it anymore; he leans in and suddenly, like another fact of the universe, they're kissing. Eddie makes a wounded noise deep in his throat, like he's been punched, and Richie squeezes his eyes closed and desperately tries not to think about anything except for this exact moment, this short thirty seconds, which Richie will be thinking about for the rest of his life, regardless of what happens after it's over.

"You didn't let me finish," Eddie says, in an inhaled breath, a split second after Richie breaks for air.

"Uh," Richie says, his mouth tingling, "no. Sorry."

"Ah," Eddie mumbles in reply, his nose nudging against the side of Richie's, jostling his glasses slightly out of place. The beach looks kind of crooked and fuzzy, especially as the backdrop to Eddie's curls, which are the only things Richie can see clearly at the moment. He's not complaining. "Fuck it, I mean. Whatever." He surges forward and kisses Richie again, and Richie laughs incredulously - perhaps also a little hysterically - into it, feeling giddy and reckless and a little shamefully turned on by the linen pants, despite anything he'd said to the contrary earlier that morning. "Rich - Richie - "

"What?" Richie manages, currently being borne down into the sand by Eddie's weight, both of them scrambling to get horizontal at the same time that they're attempting to avoid getting wet grit in uncomfortable places, "Eddie, oh my God. What?" He laughs again, jerking his head back as his back hits the ground, Eddie's legs on either side of his waist. "Oh my God. You're on top of me."

"Yeah, I guess I am," Eddie says. Richie feels like he's been shot in the chest, looking up at him with his mouth swollen and red, his hair a windswept mess on top of his head. "I was just gonna say - I wouldn't have cheated on you. Even if it went bad between us. I wanted to say that."

Richie can't speak, blown to pieces once more. "Eddie."

"It felt important to say it," Eddie continues, sliding one warm palm up Richie's chest, cupping it softly around Richie's jaw. Richie opens his mouth, wanting desperately to say something, but there's so much _to_ say, how could he possibly get any of it out? How could he even put into words, what he's feeling right now? "I should also say for the record that this wasn't my plan. Sunset on the beach - you know. It's a little cliche."

"Really?" Richie squawks. He can feel Eddie's dick, pressing through those mom vacation pants, against his stomach. "I don't give a fucking shit. Are you kidding me?"

"I'm just saying, I bought expensive champagne this morning, goddamn it," Eddie says frustratedly, and Richie gets choked up again. "Oh, you big sap. Quit it, you're gonna make _me_ cry."

"Don't call me a sap, you fucking - you - " Richie stammers. "Okay, I can't call you any of my go-tos when you're straddling me. It feels wrong."

"Finally, I've found the answer," Eddie says, grinning wildly.

"Wait," Richie says, a glorious, earth-shattering realization falling over him, "what do you mean _plan?_ You _planned_ this? You were _planning_ on - on - "

"We're in _Montauk,_ Richie," Eddie says leadingly, as if that's supposed to answer the question in and of itself.

"I think I might need a Valium," Richie says faintly. The sky is spinning.

"No you fucking don't," Eddie replies fiercely, and leans down to kiss him again, which has a similar effect anyway. Richie laughs into it again, thinking, _what the fuck? What the fuck?_ over and over and over, and grips Eddie's arms tightly, trying hard just to hold on.

"Stan," Richie says.

"Richie," Stan replies. It's six o'clock in the morning in Atlanta. It's also six o'clock in Montauk, not coincidentally. Stan is squinting at his webcam, his glasses askew, wearing a rumpled t-shirt and a grumpy look on his face. "Jesus. Is someone dead?"

"No," Richie says. He glances over at the bedroom door, but Eddie doesn't appear; not that Richie had expected him to. He sleeps like a rock, to Richie's surprise and delight. They'd spent half the night talking and the other half rolling around on the mattress like teenagers, and around four Eddie had finally given up the ghost, collapsing into gentle snores against Richie's shoulder. Richie himself hasn't slept yet; he spent about an hour staring at the top of Eddie's head and waiting to wake up and when that didn't happen, he finally got up to make coffee. "I mean yes. I mean no. It's six o'clock in the morning, Stanley, I'm making coffee."

"Are you on something?" Stan asks carefully. He squints in concern at Richie's face. "You're talking really strangely."

"Eddie's in love with me," Richie says, the words bursting out of his chest. Then he immediately starts crying, which is fucking embarrassing. "Sorry, I - Jesus. Sorry. Stan, I haven't slept, and I'm so - this is so - "

"Okay," Stan says, looking torn between horror and happiness himself, not unlike the emotional conflict that Richie's been struggling with all night. "Okay, just take a breath. Eddie - you and Eddie? Last night, you and Eddie?"

"Yeah, me and Eddie," Richie confirms, taking his glasses off to rub his eyes. "God, I'm pathetic. I'm not even wearing pants right now, Stan."

"Well, I can only see you from shoulders up, so that's probably not an urgent issue," Stan says. "Richie, pour yourself some coffee. Right now. I'll wait."

Richie takes a shaky breath and then sets the phone down, and obeys. Most of the dishes here belong to the owner, and the mug Richie picks blindly out of the cupboard has a rainbow heart painted on it which is just fucking typical. He stares at it for a long second, and then puts it back in favor of a plain blue one, because no thanks. Just - no thanks.

"You good?" Stan says, when Richie picks the phone back up. "You steady?"

"Steady," Richie says, taking a drink. "Sorry. I'm a little - " he waves one of his hands.

"Okay, sure," Stan says, "understandable. Why don't you tell me why you're upset?" He's sitting on a brown couch, and Richie can see the suggestion of a kitchen behind him - white cabinets, the side of a fridge. It occurs to Richie suddenly that he's never seen Stan's house before - they've always just talked on the phone. The video call was a panicky instinct that Richie may or may not regret later. "If you want to, I mean."

"I don't know why I'm freaking out, man," Richie says. "This is...this is everything I've been thinking about for years. I wanted this. I _dreamed_ about this. But then it just falls into your lap and you think, _holy fuck is he about to turn into a clown monster and stab me?_ which is a real boner killer, to say the least. Also not the reaction I'd been picturing, when I was spending all that time hopelessly jerking off to this."

"Why is it," Stan says, pained, "that even when you're being completely sincere you still say it in the grossest way possible? Why is that?"

"Sorry," Richie says, with a watery laugh. "Habit."

"Richie." Stan looks a lot like his dad, without his hair combed. He keeps shaking his curls irritably out of his eyes, and pushing his glasses up on his nose with the heel of his hand. "You're overwhelmed. That's all - you haven't slept, you're emotional - "

"I'm always fucking emotional," Richie says, "some would say _over_ emotional - "

"You need to sleep," Stan says firmly. Richie's already shaking his head, and Stan's face turns rueful. "But if you can't do that, maybe you could just tell me what happened, instead. Again - if you want."

"You want to hear the whole story?" Richie asks, with another sad little laugh. "I'm warning you now, there's more crying than you'd expect. Mostly from me."

"No, I expected the crying," Stan corrects wryly, settling back into the couch. "Yeah, tell me. We haven't talked in weeks, Rich, and it's _you and Eddie._ I wanna hear."

And when Stan says something like that, of course Richie is going to listen, so he sits, and talks for awhile, until his coffee grows cold and the sun is shining brightly through the windows, casting long shadows over the kitchen table. He tells Stan about the beach, and the bad excuse to get Richie out to New York, about the AirBnb and the way Eddie freaked out on the first day and all the other obvious-in-retrospect signs that Richie had totally fucking missed on account of being a self-sabotaging dumbass with bad confidence issues. At some point, Patty wanders into frame and then Richie finds himself telling her the story too - interrupting himself at different points to provide her with backstory, rambling stories about when they were kids and half-aborted references to IT that Richie does a really bad job of covering up.

"It's fine," Patty finally says at one point, "he finally told me the whole thing. You're all terrible liars, by the way. And you wondered why I was so suspicious," she says chastisingly, to Stan.

"Yeah, what the fuck Stan," Richie says blearily, his hands shaking around the phone. It occurs to him that he hasn't actually eaten anything since lunch yesterday; he and Eddie had skipped dinner, for obvious reasons. "You know Bill is probably telling Audra right now, too. That's why he hasn't said anything in the group chat."

"Good for him," Stan says, a little sheepish. "It's...a big step. I should call him," he finishes, as if this is just occurring to him.

"Yeah," Richie says, still watching Patty a little warily. But whether it was Richie's exhausted stories about Eddie that did the trick, or just simply being told the truth - the coldness she'd turned on all the Losers before seems gone now. "Patty, Stan - I hate to be the one to break this to you, but - "

"What," Stan says darkly.

"You're wearing the same outfit," Richie says, at length. In unison, both husband and wife look down at themselves, then at each other, then make identical faces of surprise. It's like a cartoon.

"I bought these robes last winter," Patty says, "and my shirt actually has a logo on it, you just can't see it on the camera - "

"Your hair even looks the same," Richie says, which is true. They're both curly-haired, auburn-colored and evenly tanned, messy and disheveled in their pajamas in a way that still somehow looks deliberate. If Patty had glasses on it would be almost eerie. "I can't do this. Your heterosexualness is really messing with my big gay morning, guys."

"You need to go to bed," Stan orders. "You look like you're about to pass out."

"Yes, go back to Eddie," Patty says sweetly, which is such a ground-shaking sentence that Richie blinks at the camera stupidly for a second, still somehow processing. "You really do seem tired. You're even slurring your words a little, kiddo."

"Oh," Richie says blankly. "I am?"

"I'll call you later, Rich," Stan says warmly, a smile on his face. "Hey. Listen. It's real. You got it now? It's real."

"Yeah," Richie chokes out, on the verge of tears again. He ends the call in a rush after that, not wanting to make them watch him cry _again._ There's only so much dignity in embracing your emotions; after you burst into tears for the fourth or fifth time you just start to annoy people.

Eddie is still passed out cold when Richie tentatively creeps back into the bedroom, feeling awkward and weird, like he's at a sleepover and he doesn't know which bedroom he's supposed to take. Still, there's something loaded about creeping out of bed and making coffee two hours after the love of your life confesses that he's been thinking about you naked since he was twelve years old, and Richie doesn't want to take any chances.

"Whazzat," Eddie mumbles, rousing slightly when Richie climbs into the bed behind him, carefully arranging himself on the mattress so that he's close, but not clingy. It's a very practiced art of bedsharing that Richie's honed down to a science. "Rich?"

"Yeah," Richie says, wincing when his voice wobbles a little. He watches in incredulous disbelief as Eddie rolls over, groping with his eyes closed for Richie's hand, then pulls it up beneath his own cheek, using Richie's palm as a pillow. "You, uh. You comfortable there, Eds?"

"No," Eddie says blearily, before sighing in audible contentment. "Were you on the phone? Heard you talking."

"Stan," Richie says, breathless just at the sound of Eddie's voice, scratchy with sleep. "Patty calls people 'kiddo.' Isn't that cute?"

"Thought she hated you," Eddie says, still with his eyes closed.

"Well, she got over it," Richie says, finally letting himself relax, a little. He can feel Eddie's breath on his wrist, and there's something so tender and strange about their position, Eddie's face on top of Richie's palm, that Richie doesn't dare to move. He'll sleep like this, frozen in place, for as long as Eddie wants him to. "Eddie. Eddie, listen. Real quick, I wanna say something."

Eddie makes a questioning noise, clearly fading fast back into sleep.

"I love you," Richie says, feeling the words scrape themselves up out of his throat. He imagines them scraping up blood and viscera on their way up, cleaning out all the bullshit gunk that's been clogging up Richie's throat for decades. All that shame and embarrassment and guilt, it just gets jammed up in your vocal cords and then eventually down your esophagus and your lungs and into your heart too, a bloody tumor that you have to carve out of yourself eventually, unless you want to let it kill you. And Richie's pretty sure he doesn't want that, not anymore. "I didn't say it last night. I meant to, but you fell asleep. I love you, okay?"

"Okay," Eddie says sleepily. Richie can feel his body relaxing back into dead weight as he falls asleep. "Me too."

Richie doesn't know why, but that feels even more honest than when Eddie had said the actual words, last night.

"Okay," he says, more to himself than to anyone who might be listening. Eddie or otherwise. "Fuck it. Okay. Why not?"

Why not what? Richie doesn't know. He'll figure it out later.

"Richie," Eddie says, about six weeks later, "I hate to break it to you, but. This article? It's very hip."

"Fuck," Richie says, leaning his head back against the only truly uncomfortable chair in his apartment, which also happens to be the only piece of furniture that Eddie had sent ahead from New York. A truly ugly example of rich person taste, Richie both loves and hates it fiercely. He sits in it literally every chance he gets. "I told her not to put in the story about going to Disneyland with Carrie Brownstein."

"No, she left that out," Eddie says. "But they used the photos they took with the suit."

Richie covers his face with the paper towel he'd been previously using for his peanut butter toast. "I don't wanna see it!"

"You look very sexy," Eddie says heavily, like he's breaking tragic news. "And she's just ripping Josh to shreds, here. Which is kind of satisfying, actually."

"Aw," Richie says, into the towel. "Poor Josh. I feel so bad."

"Fucking asshole," Eddie says, which is how he refers to Josh almost exclusively. Richie has only just recently gotten him to stop hate-Googling the guy. "Oh hey, she mentions me."

"What - not by name?" Richie says. He blows the paper towel away and sits up straight, alarmed.

"No, not by name - did you even tell her my name? Come on," Eddie says, laughing a little. "Listen. _But when I ask if Tozier is speaking from experience, he finally grows quiet. 'I'm seeing somebody, yeah,' he says, as bashful as I've seen him act yet. Considering how our brunch started, that's saying something. 'It's kind of new, but it's good. It's kind of a dream come true, actually.' Lucky guy, I think. Even if Tozier isn't your type, it's hard not to fantasize about being the center of his overwhelming attention, which is arguably the reason why his career has remained stubbornly strong, throughout two decades of flops, Razzie Awards, and some seriously questionable casting choices._ Well, that's a compliment. I think."

"I did tell her she could use the story about Bruce Willis's daughter telling me I should be more subtle about using Grindr on set," Richie says. "Maybe it's a segue into that."

Eddie reads for another long moment, then laughs out loud. "Yeah," he confirms. "That's a good one."

"Now _she_ was a cool kid," Richie says. " _She_ should be the gay icon. Not me."

Eddie flips the magazine around, treating Richie to one of the photos of himself from the shoot, wearing a maroon three-piece suit and doing a headstand next to an orange tabby cat. (The cat had been the highlight of that day, honestly.) Next to his head is a little thought bubble that says, TRASHMOUTH TOZIER: GAY ICON? with a row of stylized confused emojis underneath it.

"Well," Eddie says, at length, "I mean. It says it right here."

"I hate you," Richie says, and puts the paper towel back on his face.

Eddie just cackles at him, and continues reading. This is why Richie had tried valiantly to avoid being in the apartment or in Eddie's vicinity at all when the article came out; he can't fucking stand sitting there, watching people react to him. He always skips out on the actual movie part of movie premieres for this exact reason, and he's made it a non-negotiable clause in his riders that the venues he performs at keep the backstage monitors turned _off._ Or at least the ones he might accidentally catch glimpses of as he paces around after the show, anyway.

Not that Richie's done much pacing recently; he's been working mostly on voiceover gigs, which is steady money if a bit hacky, but Eddie's been surprisingly helpful in that arena, having a litigious personality and a vested interest in Richie's self-esteem. He's signed on to do a couple audiobooks - one of which is a novel by an author Bill knows, which resulted in a very funny-slash-frustrating conversation as Richie attempted to explain why he really didn't want to record Bill's new novel, and no of course it doesn't have anything to do with that sex scene Billy, why on earth would you think that's the reason? (That's absolutely the reason. The new book's narrator is clearly a self-insert for Bill himself, and all of the Losers now know much more about Bill and Audra's sex life than any of them cared to.)

There's also a kids cartoon movie part that his new agent - Cassandra, horrible person, Eddie adores her - is in the process of strong-arming Disney about; Richie's not holding his breath. He is holding it about a Netflix gig that's actually sort of interesting though - and a recurring role, with the possibility for renewal, even - and a cameo he's filming in a couple months for a friend's indie project, one of his old film school buddies from back in the day. Funny, really, how Richie actually did have all these friends that he'd forgotten about, all of whom came sheepishly crawling out of their various vanity projects and niche production companies to say _hey what's up man_ to the resident forcibly-outed gay guy in their life.

He's even been emailing with Sandy, wonders never cease. She was apologetically awkward about the whole thing at first, and then promptly brought up the time they were going to try pegging, but chickened out at the least second. She always was kind of an asshole about the emotional stuff; Richie is fondly reminded of how much he liked that about her.

( _After we bought the harness and EVERYTHING,_ Richie lamented. Sandy replied with two giant laughing emojis and said, _yeah that bitch cost like two hundred dollars._ )

"Aw," Eddie says, flipping the page, "Rich. You made her cry."

"Not in a bad way!" Richie says. "She was this terrifying, middle-aged lesbian with like, broad shoulders and overalls and combat boots. I was terrified at first, but then I started trying to make her laugh, and I think she indulged me about that, but that's probably why I seem so manic in the quotes. But then she brought up the closet stuff and we were both blubbering by the end."

Eddie looks a little on the edge of a blubber himself, reading the last few paragraphs of the article, which Richie knows is when the heavy stuff comes in. "Rich."

"Shut up," Richie says, covering his face again. "No. Don't look at me while you read it."

" _It's easy to forget how close those days are to our current present, which is overflowing with lesbian celebrity weddings and wholesome gay dads on NBC sitcoms. Marriage equality seemed to be, at least from a casual viewpoint, the final sprint, the victory flag at the end of a long race. But as many in our community know, visibility is often accompanied by violence. 2016 was the deadliest year on record for LGBTQ Americans, a fact which would remain true even were it not for the horrific mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando that claimed 49 lives, in June of last year._

_'It's not that I mean to be ungrateful, or bitter about how some of these kids talk about it, because on one hand I feel relieved,' Tozier tells me. 'What kind of monster would I be, if I resented them for being loud about it? I want them to be proud. But at the same time, that confidence is still unfathomable to me. That you could just walk down the street holding hands, and not be afraid? I don't know that I'll ever get there. And that's like, embarrassing. To be forty-one and still so scared. It's embarrassing.'_

_Tozier's conflict is not one that I'm unfamiliar with, either. I'd gone into this interview initially with a lot of doubts, his low-brow style of humor being not to my taste (to put it lightly), but even the laziest bit of research into Tozier's hometown of Derry, Maine was a sobering, bone-chilling experience. Forty-five children disappear from Derry, on average, every year, which is more than the rest of the state combined. That's in a town with a population of less than 20,000. Hate crime statistics from the past five years are ten times the state-wide average, and thirteen times the national. Last summer, a gay man was beaten to death and his body thrown over the side of a bridge at Derry's annual Canal Days Festival, a vicious, homophobic attack that took place only a few blocks away from Tozier's childhood home. This occurred just days after President Obama designated the Stonewall Inn as the first-ever national monument to gay rights._

_So it's not difficult to fill in the blanks in Tozier's long silences. It is difficult, however, to look him in the eye while I imagine what he might not be telling me. The fear embarrasses me, too. But it's also there for a reason, and what strikes me about him more than anything else is that he seems to think he's the only one who still feels it._ "

Eddie's voice trails off, and Richie winces, squirming with equal parts embarrassment and shame. "I didn't tell her anything specific, she just - assumed some things, and technically I told her that Derry was on the record."

"Rich," Eddie says again, and reaches out for his hand. Richie gives it to him and Eddie immediately squeezes it tight. "I won't read any more out loud. I'm sorry."

"Well, I read most of it already," Richie mumbles. "She was sending me excerpts as they were editing."

"It's a good interview," Eddie says, folding up the magazine and pushing it aside. "I think it's gonna make you pretty hip, though. Sorry about that too."

" _Fucking_ reporters," Richie says.

Eddie smiles grimly. "Did she say anything you didn't like?" Richie shrugs, and then shakes his head. "Good. Then you deserve it." He pulls Richie's hand up and presses his lips against the back of his wrist. Richie can feel his pulse fluttering, beneath the touch. "Josh can eat shit. It's an amazing fucking interview."

"Your obsession with my irrelevant ex from twenty years ago is starting to concern me, Eddino," Richie says.

"Don't call me that," Eddie says lazily.

"Sorry. Eddifer."

Eddie scowls. "I want more toast," he announces, and then glares at Richie until he gets the hint and rises to his feet with a grumble. "Almond butter, not peanut."

"Anything for _my_ peanut," Richie taunts, leaning down to kiss the crown of Eddie's head. Eddie swats him away, then seems to change his mind mid-motion and pulls Richie down by his shirt collar to plant a sloppy kiss against the sharp edge of his jaw.

"Listen," Eddie says, which is how he always begins this particular sentence, "I love you, Richie."

"Listen," Richie says back, pressing his forehead against Eddie's crown to hide the absolutely embarrassing sappy ass look on his face, "I love you too."

"Okay." He swats Richie away again. "Wheat bread, please."

"Did you just say 'please?'" Richie asks incredulously.

"Fine. Wheat bread, _asshole_."

"Yeah, that's better," Richie says.

One soft infested summer  
Me and Terry became friends  
Trying in vain to breathe  
The fire we was born in

[Bruce Springsteen, Backstreets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oID_fZDtcs0)

**Author's Note:**

> [law of desire](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcq9a313MZ8) is a 1987 pedro almodóvar film (one of his many collabs with antonio banderas) and his first one that dealt with gay and transgender themes and relationships. it's rated NC-17 due to the explicit sex scenes, but youtube actually has it falsely listed as R so it can carry it on its paid movie streaming service, which i've always thought was hilarious.
> 
> [a home at the end of the world](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/michael-cunningham-2/a-home-at-the-end-of-the-world/) is a 1990 novel by michael cunningham about a polyamorous relationship between a gay man, a bisexual man, and a straight woman who have a child together in the 80s. stan deems it an insensitive gift mostly because (spoiler) one of the characters is closeted and conflicted about his sexuality, and the other - while more self-accepting - contracts HIV. it probably would've hit very close to home for richie in 1992, even more than it hit me when i read it in the early 2000s. 
> 
> [the u.s. camel corps](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/whatever-happened-wild-camels-american-west-180956176/) was a real program in the 1850s, and after it failed to be viable many of them were released into the wild, which did, in fact, scare the shit out of some people who'd never seen camels before. there were sightings of these camels up until the 1930s!! the quote about "blobbish head" is a bastardization of a quote from [general douglas macarthur](https://armyhistory.org/the-u-s-armys-camel-corps-experiment/), who saw one in new mexico at age five (he did know what it was, though.) there's an amazing western novel by téa obreht that came out last year, [inland](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780812992861), that follows a solider in the camel corps, i highly recommend it. 
> 
> bruce springsteen has a lot of songs that are ambiguously queer (at least to my interpretation), my favorite of which is _backstreets_ ([this essay is a great read](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bruce-springsteen-queerness-essay/) on springsteen's cultural place in the zeitgeist if you're interested), but the song eddie chooses, [tougher than the rest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_91hNV6vuBY), is notable specifically because springsteen included footage of gay couples in the music video. this was in 1988, and it would've been one of the first times a mainstream artist did this.
> 
> janis joplin's cover of [me and bobby mcgee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXV_QjenbDw) was also one of my favorites growing up, but what most people don't know about janis is that [she was actually closeted herself](https://slate.com/culture/2015/12/janis-little-girl-blue-where-are-joplins-lesbian-relationships.html) and had [at least two](https://www.ebar.com/news///247444) significant [romantic relationships](https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/peggy-caserta-janis-joplins-love-comes-clean-for-real.html) with women in her life. 
> 
> matthew shepard was born in 1976, the same year richie and the losers would've been (in the muschietti movies anyway). [his family started the Matthew Shepard Foundation](https://www.matthewshepard.org/about-us/our-story/) in his honor, and their efforts after his death were instrumental to the passage of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC: Change Partners](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25088317) by [skeilig_mp3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig_mp3/pseuds/skeilig_mp3)




End file.
